The adaptive consequences of pride in personal selling

This study examines the adaptive consequences of pride in personal selling and its self-regulation with colleagues and customers. Study 1 investigates the effects of experiencing pride, where two benefits were found. First, pride increases salespersons’ performance-related motivations. Specifically, it promotes the use of adaptive selling strategies, greater effort, and self-efficacy. Second, pride positively affects organizational citizenship behaviors. Study 2 takes an emotion-process point of view and compares excessive pride (hubris) with positive pride. The results show that salespeople are capable of self-regulating the expression of these emotions differently toward colleagues and customers via anticipated feelings of fear, shame, and regret. Salespeople, in other words, are affected by their emotions, but they also are capable of controlling them to their advantage. Willem Verbeke (verbeke@few.eur.nl) is a chaired professor of sales and account management at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research has appeared in a number of academic journals, including theJournal of Marketing, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Management, theJournal of Organizational Behavior, and theJournal of Applied Psychology. His area of research interests includes personal selling, sales management, emotions and emotion regulation, social capital, and knowledge management. Frank Belschak (belschak@few.eur.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing and organizational behavior at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Cologne in Germany. His current research interests include emotions and emotion regulation in organizations and across cultures, as well as social capital and networks. Richard P. Bagozzi (bagozzi@rice.edu) is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management in the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and a professor of psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He conducts research on human emotions, the theory of action, goal setting and goal striving, and structural equation methods.     

Ethics in industrial selling: How product and service salespeople compare

Industrial product and service salespeople encounter certain practices that may be ethically troublesome. Do product and service salespeople have different ethical beliefs about these practices? Answers to this question have not appeared in the marketing literature. This paper poses three potential reasons why these two groups may have different ethical beliefs and then presents results and implications of a study that examined this issue.     

The link between salespeople’s job satisfaction and customer satisfaction in a business-to-business context: A dyadic analysis

Although it has frequently been argued that the job satisfaction of a company’s employees is an important driver of customer satisfaction, systematic research exploring this link is scarce. The present study investigates this relationship for salespeople in a business-to-business context. The theoretical justification for a positive impact of salespeople’s job satisfaction on customer satisfaction is based on the concept of emotional contagion. The analysis is based on a dyadic data set that involves judgments provided by salespeople and their customers collected across multiple manufacturing and services industries. Results indicate the presence of a positive relationship between salespeople’s job satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the relationship between salespeople’s job satisfaction and customer satisfaction is found to be particularly strong in the case of high frequency of customer interaction, high intensity of customer integration into the value-creating process, and high product/service innovativeness.     

An empirical investigation of salespeople’s performance,effort and selling method during a sales contest

This article examines goal theory in conjunction with sales contests. Specifically, the study examines goal difficulty, goal clarity, and goal acceptance and their association with performance, effort and selling method. The results of the study are based on a sales contest of a Fortune 500 industrial sales organization. A theoretical base for goal theory is reviewed. Results indicate that difficult goals and increased acceptance of goals are important attributes in a sales contest. Other results are presented and managerial implications are discussed.     

Relationship marketing in consumer markets: Antecedents and consequences

Understanding the motivations of consumers to engage in relationships with marketers is important for both practitioners and marketing scholars. To develop an effective theory of relationship marketing, it is necessary to understand what motivates consumers to reduce their available market choices and engage in a relational market behavior by patronizing the same marketer in subsequent choice situations. This article draws on established consumer behavior literature to suggest that consumers engage in relational market behavior due to personal influences, social influences, and institutional influences. Consumers reduce their available choice and engage in relational market behavior because they want to simplify their buying and consuming tasks, simplify information processing, reduce perceived risks, and maintain cognitive consistency and a state of psychological comfort. They also engage in relational market behavior because of family and social norms, peer group pressures, government mandates, religious tenets, employer influences, and marketer policies. The willingness and ability of both consumers and marketers to engage in relational marketing will lead to greater marketing productivity, unless either consumers or marketers abuse the mutual interdependence and cooperation. He has published more than 200 books and research papers in different areas of marketing. His bookThe Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969) with John A. Howard is a classic in the field. He has recently published two scholarly books:Marketing Theory: Evolution and Evaluation (1988) andConsumption Values and Market Choices (1991). He is on the editorial boards of at least a dozen scholarly journals in marketing, international business, and quantitative methods; he is also series editor ofResearch in Marketing (JAI Press). Prior to joining Emory, he was an associate professor of marketing at XLRI Jamshedpur in India. He received his M.B.A. and Ph.D. from Banaras Hindu University, India. He has authored a number of articles in the area of international marketing, business alliances, and environmental marketing. He is coeditor ofResearch in Marketing (Annual Series, JAI Press) and serves on the editorial review board ofInternational Marketing Review.     

Social influence on salespeople’s adoption of sales technology: a multilevel analysis

The implementation of sales force automation applications (SFA) often fails owing to the lack of adoption by salespeople. Previous studies investigating drivers of salespeople’s SFA adoption have mainly scrutinized predictors on the level of salespeople (within-level analysis). Hence, these studies have mostly neglected the social influence of coworkers’ and superiors’ SFA adoption on salespeople’s SFA adoption. We introduce a new perspective using a multilevel framework of SFA adoption at several hierarchical levels. The findings demonstrate that coworkers’ and superiors’ SFA adoption has a positive effect on subordinates’ SFA adoption which goes beyond the commonly tested determinants. Also, results reveal differences among predictors of the Technology Acceptance Model (within-level effects) examined at three different hierarchical levels.     

Antecedents and consequences of environmental stewardship in boundary-spanning B2B teams

The authors examine antecedents and consequences of environmental stewardship in frontline business-to-business teams. On the basis of data from members of 34 teams organized into regional networks, they demonstrate the differential impact of team environmental stewardship on customer satisfaction ratings and sales. Furthermore, the results reveal lagged individual-level effects of autonomy and supervisory support on environmental stewardship, as well as lagged group-level effects of past performance. Finally, dispersion models of team stewardship differentially moderate antecedent–stewardship relationships. Whereas within-team consensus strengthens the impact of past satisfaction ratings on subsequent stewardship, between-team consensus weakens the negative impact of past sales.     

A model of sales supervisor leadership behavior and retail salespeople’s job-related outcomes

Retail salespeople play an important role in a retailer’s marketing mix, yet little empirical research has examined how retail managers might assist sales personnel in the performance of their jobs. This paper reports the results of a study that explored a causal model of sales supervisor “leadership behavior” and seven job-related outcomes of retail salespeople. Implications for retailers and researchers are provided.     

Understanding the adoption of new brands through salespeople: a multilevel framework

So far there has been scant empirical attention paid to the role of the sales force in the adoption of new brands in the early implementation stages. We test a framework of internal (sales manager and salespeople) brand adoption using an empirical multilevel study. Our findings suggest that the construct of expected customer demand (ECD) plays an important role in sales force brand adoption. First, ECD directly influences salespeople’s and sales managers’ brand adoption. Second, ECD serves as a cross-level moderator of new brand adoption transmission. We find the influence of sales managers’ brand adoption on salespeople’s brand adoption to be stronger when salespeople’s ECD is lower.     

Gaining and leveraging customer-based competitive intelligence: the pivotal role of social capital and salesperson adaptive selling skills

This study explores the generation and use of competitive intelligence (CI) within the buyer–seller exchange process and its influence on salesperson performance. Using the concept of social capital as a theoretical foundation and multilevel data collected at three time points from 686 customer–salesperson dyads, the authors empirically test a conceptual framework that proposes both antecedents and consequences of CI sharing between customer and salesperson. The results of the study demonstrate that CI sharing by customers is a function of salesperson customer orientation, customer-centric extra-role behaviors, and relationship quality. CI sharing translates into increased perceived value, share-of-wallet, and profit margins when the salesperson utilizes the information to position and differentiate his or her product; however this occurs only when the salesperson has strong adaptive selling skills. Surprisingly, CI negatively influences these outcomes among low-adaptive salespeople, indicating that CI can actually work to a firm’s disadvantage if the salesperson is not equipped to respond to it. These findings suggest that CI must be examined differently than general market knowledge and that firms may leverage CI to their tactical advantage at the salesperson–customer interface if managed effectively.     

Antecedents, consequences, and mediating effects of perceived moral intensity and personal moral philosophies

This study uses responses from a survey of marketing professionals in a structural equation model linking antecedents and consequences of two dimensions of personal moral philosophies (idealism and relativism) and perceived moral intensity (PMI). Mixed support is found for hypothesized effects of gender, religiosity, education, experience, salary, and corporate ethical values on idealism and relativism. Idealism increases and relativism decreases PMI in four ethical scenarios. PMI increases perceptions of ethical problems, which reduce intentions to act unethically. The study tests whether relationships between variables, revealing that PMI has direct as well as indirect effects on intentions. Intentions are also influenced by gender: women have more ethical intentions than men, on average, and this effect is not mediated by other variables in the model. Anusorn Singhapakdi is an associate professor of marketing at Old Dominion University. He has also served on the marketing faculty at Lamar University, Texas, and at Thammasat University, Thailand. His papers on topics in marketing ethics and social responsibility have been published in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and various other journals and proceedings. Scott J. Vitell is the Phil B. Hardin Professor of Marketing at the University of Mississippi. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Texas Tech University. His work has previously appeared in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Research in Marketing, International Marketing Review, and in other journals and proceedings. George R. Franke is an associate professor and Reese Phifer Fellow of Marketing at the University of Alabama. His research interests include ethics, public policy, advertising, and research methodology. His publications have received best-paper awards from theJournal of Advertising, Journal of Marketing Research, American Marketing Association, and Southern Marketing Association.     

Managing culturally diverse buyer-seller relationships: The role of intercultural disposition and adaptive selling in developing intercultural communication competence

Given the increase in cultural diversity within marketing organizations as well as within current and potential customer bases, possessing the appropriate communication skills becomes crucial to success in managing culturally diverse relationships. Although marketing researchers have recognized the importance of adaptive selling behavior for successful buyer-seller relationships, the exploration of the intercultural aspects of these relationships has only recently begun. This article examines how adaptive selling behaviors and intercultural dispositions of marketing executives contribute to their perceived intercultural communication competence. Results show that in addition to being adaptive, the intercultural disposition of a marketer is of key importance in developing intercultural communication competence. Theoretical and practical implications for incorporating intercultural communication into the development of successful buyer-seller relationships are discussed. Victoria D. Bush (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. Her research has appeared in such journals as theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Advertising Research, Industrial Marketing Management, theJournal of Public Policy and Marketing, theJournal of Business Ethics, and theJournal of Services Marketing. Her research interests are in diversity, advertising, and ethics. Gregory M. Rose (Ph.D., University of Oregon) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include consumer socialization and cross-cultural consumer behavior. He has published or has forthcoming articles in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Business Research, theJournal of Consumer Psychology, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Marketing, and other journals and proceedings. Faye Gilbert (Ph.D., University of North Texas) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. She has published in theJournal of Business Research, Psychology and Marketing, theJournal of Health Care Marketing, theJournal of Research in Pharmaceutical Economics, theJournal of Applied Business Research, theJournal of Marketing Management, theJournal of Marketing Theory and Practice, and theJournal of Marketing Education, among others. Her work emphasizes the application of consumer behavior theory to health care and to channel relationships. Thomas N. Ingram (Ph.D., Georgia State University) is a professor of marketing at Colorado State University. He has been honored as the Marketing Educator of the Year by Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI) and as a recipient of the Mu Kappa Tau National Marketing Honor Society Recognition Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contributions to the Sales Discipline. He has served as the editor of theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and is the current editor of theJournal of Marketing Theory and Practice. His primary research is in personal selling and sales management. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, among others. He is the coauthor of three textbooks:Professional Selling: A Trust-Based Approach, Sales Management: Analysis and Decision Making, andMarketing: Principles and Perspectives.     

Customer-directed selling behaviors and performance: a comparison of existing perspectives

Sales researchers have spent decades developing and empirically testing various scales that reflect distinct theoretical perspectives of salesperson behavior and job functioning. Despite extensive research in this area, little comparative work has been done to assess the relative effectiveness of these different scales in explaining salesperson performance or to explicate whether or not they are best considered in isolation or as working together—even potentially interacting—to influence sales success. We examine four established scales related to customer-directed salesperson job functioning, and look at how well they relate to both self-reported and objective job performance measures. Our analyses are based on responses from 524 salespeople drawn from three different firms. The results show that two scales (ADAPTS, Selling Skills) outperform the others. Furthermore, we find an important interaction between ADAPTS and Selling Skills that helps to predict superior objective performance.     

Listening to your customers: The impact of perceived salesperson listening behavior on relationship outcomes

A thorough understanding of how businesses gain and maintain long-term relationships with clients is critical in today’s environment. This study develops a scale for salesperson listening behavior and investigates the impact of customers’ perceptions of salespeople’s listening behavior on trust, satisfaction, and anticipation of future interaction. A structural equations model is developed and empirically tested using a sample of new car buyers. The research results suggest that listening is a higher-order construct composed of three dimensions: (a) sensing, (b) evaluating, and (c) responding. When customers perceive a high level of listening behavior by a salesperson, it enhances their trust in the salesperson and leads to greater anticipation of future interaction. Implications and future research issues are discussed. Her research interests include measurement issues, buyer-seller relationships, sales technology, and creativity. She has published inJournal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and various other journals and proceedings. His research interests include issues in personal selling, sales management, and channels of distribution. He has published inEuropean Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Journal of Retailing, Psychology and Marketing, and various conference proceedings.     

The sales manager as a Role model: Effects on trust, job satisfaction, and performance of salespeople

This study develops a conceptual framework that relates role-modeling behavior of sales managers to a set of key outcome variables and assesses the validity of the framework using a cross-sectional sample of salespeople and sales managers drawn from a variety of business-to-business sales organizations. Findings indicate that salespeople’s perceptions of their managers’ role-modeling behavior relate positively to trust in the sales manager and relate indirectly, through trust, to both job satisfaction and overall performance of salespeople. The study provides empirical validity for practitioner suggestions that sales managers should lead by example, and thus should provide a model of the behavior managers desire their salespeople to enact. His primary research interest is in the application of leadership theory to sales management. His work has been published inPersonnel Psychology andJournal of Business-to-Business Marketing.     

Psychological climate, empowerment, leadership style, and customer-oriented selling: An analysis of the sales manager-salesperson dyad

This study examined antecedents and performancerelated consequences of customer-oriented selling. The antecedents include sales managers’ leadership styles, psychological empowerment, and the psychological climates of organizations. Data were gathered on two separate performance outcome measures. Responses from 106 sales managers and 313 sales representatives were analyzed. The results indicate that transformational leadership, empowerment, and specific components of the psychological climate are important predictors of customer-oriented selling. Craig A. Martin (craig.martin@wku.edu), PhD, is an assistant professor of marketing in the Department of Marketing at Western Kentucky University. He received his PhD from the University of Memphis. He specializes in sales and sales management, the consumer socialization of adolescents, sports marketing, and advertising to adolescents. He has had research accepted for publication in theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of Consumer Marketing, theJournal of Business and Industrial Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Theory and Practice, theMarketing Management Journal, theInternational Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, theInternational Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, and multiple national and regional conferences. Alan J. Bush (alanbush@memphis.edu), PhD, is a professor of marketing in the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. His current research interests are primarily sales force research and sports marketing. His research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Business Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and others.     

Customer evaluation of retail salespeople utilizing the SOCO scale: A replication,extension, and application

Measuring retail salesperson performance is a critical, though relatively neglected research issue. We suggest that the SOCO scale may be an appropriate tool for measuring salesperson performance from the buyer’s perspective. Therefore, a replication of the SOCO scale was undertaken by having consumers evaluate retail salespeople. The SOCO scale items were slightly modified to fit the consumer sample and retail focus of the study. In addition, the number of points on the SOCO response scale was also reduced and the verbal anchors modified to better suit the needs of telephone surveys. Despite these changes, the properties of the scale were found to be strikingly similar to those reported in prior studies. It was recommended that retailers adopt the SOCO scale to measure salesperson performance.     

Digitization of selling activity and sales force performance: An empirical investigation

Firms are creating a digitized selling capability by developing Web sites designed to provide information and conduct transactions with customers, replacing many routine sales force activities. The authors use the motivationability framework to shape a conceptual model that examines the effects of the digitization of selling activity on two salesperson outcomes: salesperson effectiveness and salesperson job-insecurity. Using data from salespeople in 168 firms, they assess the moderating effects of environmental-level motivational factors and firm-level ability factors on the impact of digitization of selling activity on salesperson effectiveness and job insecurity. The results reveal that digitization has the paradoxical effect of improving salesperson effectiveness and heightening job insecurity concerns, and also that managers can improve the technology-enabled multichannel capabilities of the firm by giving priority attention to human capital improvement, sales force control systems, and communication of the digitization strategy. Devon S. Johnson (Ph.D., London Business School, dj@devonjohnson.com) is currently an assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern University, Boston. Previously, he was an assistant rofessor of marketing in the Giozueta Business School at Emory University. His research interests are the role of social capital in relational exchange and technology consumption and implementation. Sundar Bharadwaj (Sundar_Bharadwaj@bus.Emory.edu) is an associate professor of marketing in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. His general research interests focus on marketing strategy and performance and risk. His research has been published in theJournla of Marketing, Management Science, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, among others.     

Institutionalization of ethics and its consequences: a survey of marketing professionals

Because of increasing ethical problems in business, organizations have tried to control these problems by institutionalizing ethics, such as by creating new ethics positions and formulating codes of ethics. In this study, the authors develop a scale for measuring the institutionalization of ethics in organizations and assess it for dimensionality, reliability and validity. Two separate studies are conducted, both using samples drawn from an American Marketing Association practitioner population. In Study 1, using a sample of 126 marketing practitioners, we performed exploratory factor analysis on 44 institutionalization items resulting in two separate dimensions of the institutionalization of ethics construct: implicit and explicit institutionalization. Using a national sample of 306 marketing practitioners in Study 2, we performed confirmatory factor analysis on these two dimensions and investigated the effects of these dimensions on perceived importance of ethics, job satisfaction, esprit de corps and organizational commitment. Implicit institutionalization had a significant direct affect on all four of these constructs. On the other hand, explicit institutionalization significantly influenced only the perceived importance of ethics.