Introduction

In today’s competitive business environment, the success of firm increasingly hinges on the ability to operate customer relationship management (CRM) that enables the development and implementation of more efficient and effective customer-focused strategies. Based on this belief, many companies have made enormous investment in CRM technology as a means to actualize CRM efficiently. Despite conceptual underpinnings of CRM technology and substantial financial implications, empirical research examining the CRM technology- performance link has met with equivocal results. Recent studies demonstrate that only 30% of the organizations introducing CRM technology achieved improvements in their organizational performance (Bull, 2003; Corner and Hinton, 2002). These conflicting findings hint at the potential influences of unexplored mediating or moderating factors and the need of further research on the mechanism by which CRM technology leads to improved business performance. Such inconsistent results of CRM technology implementation are not limited to western countries which most of previous CRM research originated from. Even though Korean companies have poured tremendous resources to CRM initiatives since 2000, they also cut down investment in CRM technology drastically due to disappointing returns (Knowledge Research Group, 2004). As a result, Korean companies are increasingly eager to corroborate the returns from investment in CRM. In the eastern culture like Korea that promotes holistic thinking focusing on the relationships between a focal object and overall context (Monga and John, 2007),