Identifying peer mentors in the sales force: An exploratory investigation of willingness and ability

There has been a high level of interest in the sales management practitioner literature in mentoring, but very little is known about peer mentoring relationships between more experienced and less experienced salespeople. Sales organizations that wish to initiate or encourage peer mentoring relationships must identify those salespeople who are both able and willing to mentor less experienced salespeople. The results of an exploratory study to identify mentors in an industrial sales force are reported. The authors find that job experience, job satisfaction, a measure of interpersonal competence, and role conflict are associated with willingness to mentor; interpersonal competence and role conflict are associated with ability to mentor. Results are discussed and opportunities for future research are offered. She received her M.S. from Ohio State University and her M.B.A. from Wright State University. She has experience in personnel training with an industrial sales organization. Her research interests are in the areas of salesperson communication competence, buyer-seller interactions, and buyer-seller negotiation. Her research has been published in various conference proceedings. She received her Ph.D. from University of Tennessee. She has experience in industrial sales and sales management. Her research interests are in the area of buyer-seller interactions and managing sales relationships. Her research has been published inJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and various conference proceedings. Wendy L. Warren is in management at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., and has experience in new product development. She received her M.S. from Ohio State University. Her research has been published inJournal of Consumer Research.     

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIC DECISIONS

This study examines the process of upward influence in a variety of strategic decisions. The study provides a list of categories and supporting data for the agents, methods, perceived outcomes, and perceived causes of success and failure of upward influence interactions that impact upon the strategic decision-making process in organizations. The results suggest that: (a) middle-level managers (MLMs) deal directly with their superiors and use rational or persuasive arguments in their upward influence interactions in strategic decisions; (2) MLMs are very successful in their influence interactions and attribute their successes to internal causes; (3) MLMs and their superiors view the influence episode similarly; and (4) upward influence activity in strategic decisions is quite similar to upward influence activity in non-strategic decisions. The study also examines individual and organizational factors that are associated with success and failure in influence activity in strategic decision-making.     

Evidence of feedback trading with Markov switching regimes

Previous research has concluded that the degree of return autocorrelation observed in index returns varies linearly with the volatility of the series, and that feedback traders are at least partly responsible for this phenomenon. Using daily Australian bond and equity market returns, we test this conclusion directly by using a Markov switching model for changing variance that explicitly allows the autocorrelation of returns to vary with the volatility regime. We find evidence that a significant proportion of investors in both the Australian equity and bond markets are positive feedback traders and are responsible for the observed increase in negative autocorrelation in index returns during periods of high and increasing volatility.

Managing Television Commercial Time

With a limited supply of just one marketable resource, that of time, television commercial rates have to be set with a high degree of care. Under constantly changing conditions of demand and competitive intensity a station's profits can be impaired by under pricing as well as by overpricing its inventory of available time. This article, as the first in a two part series, describes the process that stations follow to set the most profitable of rates with a minimum of risk. In a sequel article to be published in the next issue of the Journal of Advertising suggestions are made to advertisers for creating time purchase strategies under different demand and competitive situations.     

Multinational Companies and Linkages: Panel-Data Evidence for the Irish Electronics Sector

This paper analyses the extent and determinants of backward local linkages between multinational companies and domestic suppliers in the Irish electronics industry, and their effect on indirect employment generated in domestic supplier firms. Several models in recent literature show that linkages between firms can lead to positive effects on the development of indigenous industry, agglomerations, technology spill-overs and indirect employment generation. Our empirical analysis, using a uniquely generated firm-level panel data set, indicates that the extent of linkages is related in a non-linear fashion to the length of time that the firm is located in Ireland. In the context of the literature on the effects of linkages, we find empirical evidence consistent with the view that growth in employment in upstream supplier firms in electronics is linked to the development of downstream firms.     

Planning and developing tourism within a public sector quagmire: Lessons from and for small countries

This paper examined public sector tourism in Northern Ireland, a small country on the periphery of Western Europe which is notorious for being over-governed. The authors found that its complex web of public sector tourism bodies created confusion and duplication within the industry. There was a lack of coordination and clear policy guidelines and many of the organisations were suffering from ‘partnership overload’. To make matters worse for Northern Ireland its National Tourism Organisation, faced with a reduced remit and shrinking budget, was not capable of making decisions and providing the strategic leadership that is required to drive the tourism agenda forward. Northern Ireland, and indeed any small country involved in tourism, could learn valuable lessons from Northern Ireland’s Celtic neighbours, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, countries which have taken action to remove some of their layers of administration and bureaucracy and make public sector tourism more streamlined and manageable.     

The Global and the Local; The Cultural Interfaces of Self-determination Movements

This paper uses Indian data to investigate the existence and nature of gender bias in the intra-household allocation of expenditure. An extended version of the collective household model is estimated where the welfare weights, i.e. the bargaining power of the adult decision-makers, are simultaneously determined with the household's expenditure outcomes. Significant gender bias is detected in some items, most notably in education, and it is found that the bias is considerably stronger in the more economically backward regions of the country. It is also found that the results of the test of gender bias vary sharply between households at different levels of adult literacy. This is particularly true of household spending on education. The gender bias in the case of this item is, generally, more likely to prevail in households with low levels of adult educational attainment than in more literate households. This result is of considerable policy importance given the strong role that education plays in human capital formation.