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It's All in the Relationship: What Really Matters When It Comes to Managing Salespeople?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wyld, David C. |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | Some managers have a “knack” for better connecting with their employees and inspiring them to be high performers. And nowhere is this more important than in sales, since sales professionals are key boundary spanners between the company and its customers. Yet until now, scholars have paid little attention to how the sales manager affects the performance of sales professionals, instead focusing on organizational factors. This would be like trying to understand professional athletes’ performance just by their association with the team instead of the extent to which they are motivated by the coach. In their recent study, Michael Ahearne (University of Houston), Till Haumann and Jan Wieseke (RuhrUniversity), and Florian Kraus (University of Mannheim) addressed such issues for the fi rst time in a sales context. They explored issues associated with how salespeople’s identifi cation with both their managers and their organization could be managed better. Specifi cally, Ahearne and his colleagues examined how the interplay of salespeople’s organizational identifi cation (i.e., the extent to which employees feels connected to the organization, seeing its successes or failures as their own) and their interpersonal identifi cation (i.e., the degree to which their beliefs about the sales manager are connected to themselves or self-defi ning) affected their sales performance and their ability to satisfy customers. There is solid evidence that salespeople who better identify with their company will produce superior results. But Ahearne and his colleagues proposed that while companies generally want salespeople to identify with and have a positive relationship with their sales managers, there can also be dangerous “incongruences” when salespeople identify with their individual managers. In these cases, both “too little” and “too much” of a connection between these individuals may negatively impact sales performance. Moreover, how the sales force is managed and controlled can play a moderating role and mitigate the effect that such issues may have on salesperson performance and their ability to satisfy their customers. STUDY DESIGN AND METHOD |
| Starting Page | 4 |
| Ending Page | 6 |
| Page Count | 3 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.5465/amp.2014.0022 |
| Volume Number | 28 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://aom.org/Publications/AMP/Research-Briefs/It-s-All-in-the-Relationship--What-Really-Matters-When-it-Comes-to-Managing-Salespeople-.aspx |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2014.0022 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
