Suchergebnisse

PurposeTo examine the influence of company‐imposed reward systems on the motivation levels of salespeople.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 214 business‐to‐business salespeople. In order to assure the adequacy of the survey instrument, several salespeople were recruited to "pretest" the questionnaire. To test the potential moderating influence of career stage on pay mix and valence, expectancy, and instrumentality estimates, a split‐group analysis was performed. To test the moderating hypotheses for risk, we used two‐step regression models in which the dependent measures (i.e. valence, expectancy, and instrumentality) were first regressed on the predictor variables as main effects, and then regressed on the multiplicative interaction term along with the main effects.FindingsSupport was found for many of the hypotheses. In particular, individual‐level variables such as career stage and risk preferences moderate the relationship between pay mix and valence for the reward, expectancy perceptions, and instrumentality perceptions.Practical implicationsManagers must acknowledge that certain salespeople respond positively to fixed salary plans while others respond positively to incentive. In the past, managers might have relied on the salesperson to select the appropriate job for them. Salespeople are not "weeding" themselves out during the recruitment process. As a result, greater importance must be placed on human resource and sales managers during the time of recruitment.Originality/valueThere already exists a robust stream of literature on person‐organization fit that suggests that employees prefer to work for companies that are compatible with their personalities. There is an increasing amount of work in multi‐level research that suggests bridging the macro (organizational) and micro (individual) perspectives will enable researchers to make linkages between research streams that are commonly viewed as unconnected.

Despite a long history of independent sales and service functions within organizations, customers are pressuring organizations to rethink their sales and service operations. Specifically, customers expect organizations to offer a "single face" of the firm rather than being forced to interact with multiple agents across both sales and service throughout their relationships. As firms attempt to meet these customer demands, they have countless options to integrate sales and service operations, but little is known about which strategies are most effective. This article attempts to shed new light into the challenges and potential benefits of sales-service integration, in an effort to spur research in this area and better inform this managerial challenge. Specifically, we formalize the concept of the sales-service interface, discuss how it relates to sales-service ambidexterity, and identify several opportunities for future research. Given the complexity of the sales-service interface, we contend that future researchers must view these issues through a multilevel lens and, as a result, we focus on identifying opportunities ideally suited for testing in a multilevel environment. The goal of this article is to provide a platform for researchers to tackle this challenging problem and generate new insights into how best to meet customer's evolving demands.