Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership (COPLG)

Abstract

The Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership (COPLG) scale is a specialized psychometric instrument operationalized by Ashwin W. Joshi and Sanjay Sharma in their foundational 2004 study published in the Journal of Marketing. Designed within the domain of new product development (NPD) and strategic management, the scale quantifies the degree to which senior corporate leadership publicly, consistently, and actively articulates and legitimizes product leadership—defined as the persistent pursuit of cutting-edge, pioneer innovations that maximize differentiated customer value—as a non-negotiable core organizational objective. The instrument measures an essential executive-level antecedent to organizational learning, psychological framing, and customer knowledge development (CKD).

Methodologically, the COPLG operationalization relies on a multi-item inventory administered with respect to specific, recently completed NPD initiatives, capturing the perceptions of cross-functional team leaders, marketing executives, and technical project leads. The construct utilizes a standard 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Psychometrically, the scale demonstrates robust internal consistency, exhibiting a Cronbach's alpha exceeding .80, strong composite reliability, and high factor determinacy under rigorous confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Empirical validation within structural equation models underscores the scale's significant nomological, convergent, and discriminant validity, notably establishing that senior management's championing of product leadership directly fosters team-level experimentation, mitigates fear of failure, and amplifies the positive performance impacts of market-driven knowledge acquisition.

Keywords

Product Leadership, Strategic Championing, New Product Development, Customer Knowledge Development, Executive Communication, Innovation Management, Organizational Learning, Sensegiving, Psychometrics, Upper Echelons Theory, Intrinsic Motivation

Authors

The Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership construct was introduced and validated by two leading scholars in marketing strategy, sustainable enterprise, and organizational behavior:

• Ashwin W. Joshi, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. Dr. Joshi's research centers on marketing strategy, inter-organizational governance, organizational learning, and the psychological and operational dynamics of new product development teams. His work has appeared in premier outlets including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Strategic Management Journal.
• Sanjay Sharma, Ph.D.: Dean and Professor of Management at the Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA (formerly of Wilfrid Laurier University). Dr. Sharma is a globally recognized authority on corporate sustainability, corporate environmental strategy, and organizational innovation, with extensive publications spanning the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership (COPLG) instrument is to operationalize and measure the communicative, symbolic, and behavioral mechanisms through which senior executives establish innovation-led market positioning as an overarching corporate priority. While strategic management literature has long asserted that top management involvement is crucial for innovation success, early empirical measures often suffered from conceptual ambiguity, conflating generic top management support or budgetary resource allocation with active strategic framing and symbolic leadership.

Joshi and Sharma (2004) developed the COPLG to capture a specific, theoretically nuanced phenomenon: the extent to which executive leaders serve as evangelists and ideological anchors for product leadership during the lifecycle of a discrete technological or commercial innovation project. In high-risk, high-uncertainty environments characteristic of new product development, teams routinely encounter friction, project setbacks, and ambiguous market signals. Without clear executive framing, project teams are prone to risk aversion, retreating into incremental product modifications or abandoning deep customer exploration due to the perceived liabilities of failure.

By measuring COPLG, researchers and organizational diagnosticians can examine several vital administrative and behavioral outcomes:

• Facilitating Customer Knowledge Development (CKD): The scale evaluates how executive signaling legitimizes the significant resource expenditures, exploratory research, and collaborative interviews required to generate actionable customer insights.
• Buffering Against Premature Termination: It measures the climate of executive tolerance for trial-and-error experimentation, determining whether project teams perceive top leadership as supportive of bold exploratory hypotheses even when intermediate milestones fail.
• Infusing Intrinsic Motivation: The instrument assesses whether top management transforms an otherwise mechanical engineering or marketing project into an intrinsically meaningful organizational crusade, elevating employee commitment beyond simple transactional compliance.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: It diagnoses the clarity of strategic intent transmitted from the corporate suite down to cross-functional operational units, ensuring marketing, R&D, and manufacturing converge on differentiated value creation.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the COPLG scale sits at the intersection of organizational sensemaking, executive rhetoric, and cognitive framing. Grounded in the strategic topologies popularized by Treacy and Wiersema (1993), product leadership represents an organizational archetype dedicated to continuous innovation, rapid commercialization of breakthrough concepts, and the active creation of new market spaces. However, the psychological construct evaluated by Joshi and Sharma is not simply the existence of such a strategy on paper; it is the active, perceived, socialized phenomenon of championing that strategy.

The construct comprises several interdependent psychological and communicative dimensions:

1. Public and Unambiguous Strategic Framing

The construct captures the frequency and clarity with which senior leaders articulate product leadership across multiple organizational forums. Psychologically, human behavior in complex environments is governed by framing effects; when leaders explicitly label an initiative as a product leadership endeavor, they alter the decision-making heuristics of subordinates. This dimension gauges the public nature of executive advocacy, ensuring that project personnel understand that innovation is not an unstated or secondary goal, but the central criterion against which organizational contributions will be evaluated.

2. Sensegiving and Meaning Infusion

Executive championing functions as a psychological mechanism of sensegiving, through which managers attempt to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality. Under the COPLG framework, leaders infuse technical routines—such as interviewing prospective users, constructing prototypes, and analyzing conjoint data—with broader institutional significance. This intrinsic value derivation elevates task engagement from an extrinsic duty into a shared collective vision, mitigating burnout and alienation.

3. Psychological De-risking and Toleration of Failure

A critical psychological facet of championing product leadership is the mitigation of risk aversion. Exploratory innovation is inherently characterized by high variance in outcomes, where false starts and design dead-ends are standard occurrences. When leadership champions product leadership as a superordinate goal, it reframes individual failures not as personal incompetence or managerial negligence, but as unavoidable investments in epistemic discovery. The COPLG construct measures the perceived durability of this executive protection.

4. Legitimization of Experimentation and Search

Finally, the construct captures the behavioral permission granted to teams to explore unconventional pathways. This dimension measures whether leadership actively rewards divergence from historical product architectures and conventional operating procedures, instilling a shared team perception that proactive market experimentation is institutional policy rather than rogue behavior.

Theoretical Framework

The Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership scale is constructed upon a multidisciplinary theoretical scaffolding incorporating cognitive psychology, sociology of organizations, and strategic leadership paradigms:

Upper Echelons Theory

Formulated by Hambrick and Mason (1984), Upper Echelons Theory posits that organizational outcomes—including strategic choices, innovation rates, and ultimate firm performance—are direct reflections of the cognitive bases, values, and behavioral dispositions of top executives. In the context of COPLG, the scale measures how the psychological orientation of the upper echelon permeates downward through direct rhetoric, prioritizing product leadership over competing orientations such as operational excellence or customer intimacy.

Sensegiving and Sensemaking Theory

Drawing on Karl Weick's work on sensemaking and Gioia and Chittipeddi's (1991) paradigm of executive sensegiving, COPLG reflects the iterative cycle through which leaders structure organizational ambiguity. In new product ventures, the customer's latent needs and competitive trajectories are often obscure. By constantly championing product leadership, top managers provide a coherent cognitive schema that informs how project team members interpret disparate market feedback, evaluate technological trade-offs, and prioritize resource allocations.

Goal Setting and Self-Regulation Theory

In accordance with Locke and Latham's Goal Setting Theory, specific, challenging, and publicly voiced goals direct attention, mobilize energy, increase persistence, and foster strategy development. COPLG acts as a high-order macro goal. When senior management repeatedly affirms product leadership, it sets a challenging performance standard that suppresses complacency and induces deep cognitive processing within teams engaged in customer knowledge acquisition and dissemination.

Self-Determination Theory and Intrinsic Motivation

Under Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation is sustained when individuals experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness to a larger social purpose. Joshi and Sharma (2004) argued that organizational champions instill a transcendent sense of purpose into NPD activities. Rather than viewing customer research as an administrative hurdle, employees view exploratory activities as intrinsically rewarding steps toward pioneering breakthrough customer value.

Validity

The psychometric integrity of the COPLG scale has been established through extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and nomological/criterion validity testing across diverse industrial samples.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the scale items that theoretically reflect the championing construct correlate strongly among themselves and load uniformly onto their latent variable. In Joshi and Sharma's empirical validation across a broad sample of manufacturing and technology firms, the COPLG scale achieved standardized factor loadings well above the widely accepted .70 benchmark (with individual loadings typically ranging between .74 and .88, p < .001). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely exceeded the recommended threshold of .50, demonstrating that the variance captured by the construct exceeds the variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using rigorous psychometric procedures, primarily the Fornell-Larcker criterion and nested model comparison tests via CFA:

• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for the COPLG scale was markedly higher than its bivariate correlations with any other latent construct in the nomological network, including project-level customer knowledge acquisition, customer knowledge dissemination, customer knowledge responsiveness, and generic supervisory support.
• Chi-Square Difference Testing: Nested confirmatory factor analytic models comparing an unconstrained model (where the correlation between COPLG and related constructs was freely estimated) against a constrained model (where the inter-construct correlation was fixed to 1.00) revealed significant chi-square differences (Δχ², p < .001), confirming that COPLG is conceptually and empirically distinct from related strategic and leadership variables.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

The predictive and nomological validity of the COPLG scale is evidenced by its hypothesized structural relationships within the customer knowledge development model:

• Antecedent to Customer Knowledge Dissemination: Empirical modeling indicates that high COPLG scores directly predict elevated levels of interdepartmental communication and cross-functional sharing of customer market data (β ranging from .25 to .42, p < .01).
• Moderating Role in Learning: COPLG moderates the relationship between market knowledge acquisition and NPD performance, indicating that market insights translate significantly better into successful new products when leadership actively frames product leadership as the core institutional imperative.
• Direct Impact on Competitive Differentiation: Longitudinal and post-launch evaluations confirm that projects operating under high perceived COPLG achieve superior market differentiation, enhanced customer satisfaction, and higher ROI compared to projects lacking senior executive advocacy.

Reliability

The reliability of the COPLG scale has been confirmed through classical test theory metrics and contemporary latent variable assessments:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach's Alpha): Across empirical deployments in NPD research, the scale exhibits high internal consistency. In the initial validation by Joshi and Sharma (2004), the Cronbach's α reached .85, comfortably surpassing Nunnally and Bernstein's (1994) benchmark of .70 for established organizational measures. Subsequent replication studies in high-technology, engineering, and consumer goods manufacturing have documented alpha coefficients consistently spanning .82 to .89.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Within a structural equation modeling framework, the composite reliability of the latent construct has been evaluated to avoid the underestimation biases common to Cronbach's alpha. Composite reliability indices for the COPLG construct typically exceed .86, reflecting exceptional internal coherence among the observed indicators.
• Item-to-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each item within the scale exceed .60, ensuring that every operational indicator contributes meaningfully to the total variance of the construct without redundancy.
• Stability and Test-Retest Properties: While new product development environments are inherently dynamic, assessments across different phases of the NPD process (e.g., concept generation versus launch phase) show stable measurement properties, demonstrating that the construct reliably measures perceived executive climate over the multi-month lifespan of an innovation project.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Championing the Organisational Goal of Product Leadership scale was evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development, the candidate items were subjected to principal axis factoring with oblique (Promax) rotation to accommodate expected correlations among strategic leadership dimensions. The analysis revealed a clear, unifactorial latent structure:

• A single dominant factor emerged with an eigenvalue exceeding 3.0, explaining more than 65% of the total variance.
• Scree plot analysis exhibited a sharp, unambiguous drop-off after the first extraction, supporting the conceptualization of COPLG as a unidimensional construct.
• All items displayed high communalities (typically > .55) and strong primary loadings onto the single factor, with zero cross-loadings exceeding .20 on peripheral leadership or resource factors.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent testing utilizing maximum likelihood estimation within structural equation modeling software (e.g., LISREL, AMOS, Mplus) confirmed the unidimensional factor structure across full measurement models:

• Model Fit Indices: The unidimensional specification for COPLG, when embedded alongside the multidimensional customer knowledge development system, demonstrated superior fit indices: χ²/df < 2.0; Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .96; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .95; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .05; and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .04.
• Standardized Factor Loadings: Standardized loadings (λ) for the individual survey items ranged from .75 to .87, with all t-values significant at p < .001. These results verify that the latent construct accounts for the vast majority of variance in its observed behavioral indicators.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The COPLG instrument is structured as a dedicated project-level psychometric questionnaire designed for administration in corporate, manufacturing, engineering, and technology-driven settings. Its core structural parameters include:

• Test Type: Standardized organizational climate and strategic leadership rating scale.
• Target Informants: New product development project managers, lead design engineers, cross-functional team leaders, and senior product marketing managers who possess direct visibility into both executive strategic messaging and operational project execution.
• Administration Context: Evaluated with reference to a specific, recently completed (or late-stage) new product development project, preventing generalized organizational abstraction by tying responses to concrete operational experiences.
• Item Count: Multi-item inventory (typically 4 core items in the published empirical operationalization).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neutral (Neither Agree nor Disagree)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring and Aggregation Procedures:
  • Individual scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all retained indicators following confirmatory screening.
  • No items are reverse-coded in the baseline inventory; higher aggregated scores denote higher levels of perceived executive championing for product leadership.
  • When multiple informants from a single NPD project are surveyed, inter-rater reliability (e.g., r_wg ≥ .70; ICC(1) and ICC(2)) must be verified prior to aggregating individual scores into a composite project-level metric.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Initial Publication: 2004.
• Original Publication Source: Journal of Marketing, Volume 68, Issue 4, pages 47–59.
• Copyright Holder: American Marketing Association (AMA).
• Academic Research Usage & Permissions: The theoretical dimensions and empirical frameworks of the scale are accessible in the published academic literature. Researchers wishing to utilize or adapt the exact scale items for non-commercial, academic scientific research must consult the original publication and comply with fair-use provisions and the American Marketing Association’s permissions policies.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial deployments, corporate diagnostic use, consulting applications, or reprinting within commercial assessment platforms require formal written permissions and licensing agreements through the American Marketing Association or the Copyright Clearance Center.
• Access Fees: Access to the original journal article may require an institutional academic subscription or individual purchase through the publisher (SAGE Publications / American Marketing Association).

References

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
• Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 433–448. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120604
• Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1984.4277628
• Joshi, A. W., & Sharma, S. (2004). Customer knowledge development: Antecedents and impact on new product performance. Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.4.47.42722
• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal setting & task performance. Prentice-Hall.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Treacy, M., & Wiersema, F. (1993). Customer intimacy and other value disciplines. Harvard Business Review, 71(1), 84–93.
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. SAGE Publications.

Items of the Scale