This article reconciles mixed findings about the performance impact of middle managers' strategy involvement. We propose that the relationship between middle managers' adaptive strategy ...implementation—through upward and downward influence—and objective business performance can be curvilinear and contingent on formal and informal structures. Applying a multilevel perspective to social networks, we empirically show that reputational social capital enhances the performance impact of middle managers' upward influence while informational social capital elevates the performance impact of their downward influence. The size of a business unit or region has differntial moderating effects. The curvilinear effects of middle managers' upward influence and reputational and informational social capital on business unit performance reflect paradoxes. We discuss the implications of these findings for strategy implementation research and practice.
There has been little research on how market disruptions affect customer—brand relationships and how firms can sustain brand loyalty when disruptions occur. Drawing from social identity theory and ...the brand loyalty literature, the authors propose a conceptual framework to examine these issues in a specific market disruption, namely, the introduction of a radically new brand. The framework focuses on the time-varying effects of customers' identification with and perceived value of the incumbent relative to the new brand on switching behavior. The authors divert from the conventional economic perspective of treating brand switching as functional utility maximization to propose that brand switching can also result from customers' social mobility between brand identities. The results from longitudinal data of 679 customers during the launch of the iPhone in Spain show that both relative customer—brand identification and relative perceived value of the incumbent inhibit switching behavior, but their effects vary over time. Relative customer—brand identification with the incumbent apparently exerts a stronger longitudinal restraint on switching behavior than relative perceived value of the incumbent. The study has important strategic implications for devising customer relationship strategies and brand investment.
Existing research treats sales performance as a series of discrete, independent events rather than a series of sales attempts with intertemporal spillover across these attempts. This research ...examines whether there are systematic short-term trends (“momentum”) in sales performance. To do so, the authors use the clumpiness approach to examine the existence of sales momentum in a high-frequency call-level data set obtained from two call centers of a large European firm. They further investigate the effect of positive (negative) momentum, or the positive (negative) deviation from the long-term expected performance on subsequent sales performance. Exploiting the differences in the social environment of the call centers, the authors find that the social working environment mitigates the harmful effect of negative momentum and sustains positive momentum. Further, they demonstrate that calls made midday, early-week, and late-week boost performance by mitigating the adverse effects of negative momentum. The findings suggest that monitoring sales performance can help managers detect momentum and use timely interventions to enhance sales productivity. Managers can also leverage momentum by creating a more social working environment to optimize overall salesperson performance.
There is little empirical research on internal marketing despite its intuitive appeal and anecdotal accounts of its benefits. Adopting a social identity theory perspective, the authors propose that ...internal marketing is fundamentally a process in which leaders instill into followers a sense of oneness with the organization, formally known as "organizational identification" (OI). The authors test the OI-transfer research model in two multinational studies using multilevel and multisource data. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses show that the OI-transfer process takes place in the relationships between business unit managers and salespeople and between regional directors and business unit managers. Furthermore, both leader—follower dyadic tenure and charismatic leadership moderate this cascading effect. Leaders with a mismatch between their charisma and OI ultimately impair followers' OI. In turn, customer-contact employees' OI strongly predicts their sales performance. Finally, both employees' and sales managers' OI are positively related to their business units' financial performance. The study provides empirical evidence for the role of leaders, especially middle managers, in building member identification that lays the foundation for internal marketing.
Research examining technology and the sales force has a long, developed history that spans several decades. From initial research reviewing sales force laptop usage to more recent studies ...investigating the effects of advanced customer relationship management applications, much insight has been garnered regarding technology and sales. However, much of this investigation has occurred in business-to-business environments, leaving what we believe to be a considerable gap in knowledge on technology in business-to-consumer settings. In this paper, we briefly review some areas of research that we believe have seen abundant investigation and offer other fruitful avenues for research. We conclude that in businessto-consumer sales interactions, technology takes on a varying role and often enables a salesperson to complete a sale successfully, but seldom replaces the human interaction necessary to further develop the relationship.
In V. Kumar’s editorial, BThe Role of University Research Centers in Promoting Research^ (Kumar, 2017), he describes the anatomy of an effective university research center. He particularly stresses ...the critical value of conducting evidence-based research, such as the customer and brand value research he oversees at Georgia State’s Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management (CEBCM). Kumar also stresses the importance of deep integration with practitioners. I strongly support both of these contentions and agree that in order for a research center to be effective it must maintain, as Kumar says, Bcontributions in research, teaching, and service to both the academic and the business communities. And nowhere has this proven truer than in the area of sales and sales management. Meaningful research strengthens the link between academia and business For decades, business schools have conducted research and taught students the lessons of business through organizational snapshots (particularly in the areas of marketing and finance). But as Kumar (2017) rightly points out, the value of this material is limited.Without evidence-based research, it is difficult to help students apply the lessons of these anecdotal case studies to the real world.
Real Earnings Management in Sales AHEARNE, MICHAEL J.; BOICHUK, JEFFREY P.; CHAPMAN, CRAIG J. ...
Journal of accounting research,
December 2016, Letnik:
54, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We surveyed 1,638 sales executives across 40 countries regarding their companies' likelihood of asking sales to perform real earnings management (REM) actions when earnings pressure exists. Using ...this information, which we refer to as companies' REM propensities, we study how company characteristics and environmental conditions relate to the responses received. The use of cash-flow incentives for sales personnel and the distribution of interfunctional power in favor of finance rather than sales are both associated with companies' REM propensities. In addition, we show that sales executives preemptively change their behaviors in anticipation of top management's REM requests. Sales executives working for public companies and companies in the United States reported higher levels of REM propensity. The data also support an association between REM propensity and finance–sales conflict. These findings and others are compared and contrasted with existing empirical and survey-based research on REM throughout the paper.
Sales contests are short-term incentives that managers use to raise sales effort. The extant marketing theory predicts that the optimal prize structure should have two characteristics: (1) The number ...of prize-winners should be greater than one, and (2) prize values should be unique and rank ordered. However, this theory has not been empirically examined. This article presents two empirical studies that examine whether the prize structure of a sales contest affects sales performance. In each study, the authors investigate the incremental effects of introducing multiple prizewinners and unique rank-ordered prizes into a sales contest. The first study consists of two laboratory experiments in which participants make decisions that closely reflect the decision trade-offs in the theoretical model of sales contests. The second study consists of two field economic experiments in which trained salespeople sell fundraising sponsorships to companies. The results across the experiments are remarkably consistent: The number of prizewinners in a sales contest should indeed be greater than one. However, introducing rank-ordered prizes into contests with multiple prizewinners does not boost sales effort and revenues.
The purpose of this article is to explain why salespeople adopt information technology. The results from a cross-sectional study of 229 salespeople indicate that putting sales technology to use ...strongly depends on salespeople's perceptions about the technology enhancing their performance, their personal innovativeness and organizational efforts in terms of user training. Throughout the adoption process companies also need to target sales line managers–next to end users–because salespeople clearly comply with the expectations of their supervisors. Finally, the threat from competing sales professionals or peers who use similar sales technology seems to be of secondary importance for individual sales technology adoption.
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