دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی افزایش روحیه نیروی فروش در بازارهای بسیار پویا و پیچیده: نقش منابع شغلی - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Sales force morale constitutes an important managerial topic that is often linked to key outcomes such as sales force turnover and productivity. Unfortunately, however, scholarly work in this area is strikingly limited. Accordingly, the goal of this study is to provide a first rigorous assessment of the role of morale in a sales context. Drawing on Job Demands-Resource (JD-R) as our theoretical lens and using a unique dataset that includes responses from three sources (i.e., sales managers, salespeople, and secondary objective data) from 81 companies over two time periods, our study makes several contributions. First, we offer a conceptualization of sales force morale and thus advance this timely and managerially relevant topic in a JD-R setting. Second, we show the negative impact of market demands (i.e., customer purchase complexity and market dynamism) on sales force morale. Third, the findings highlight the positive impact of morale on sales force turnover and productivity. Fourth, results show that two job resources attenuate the negative impact of market demands on sales force morale (i.e., sales capabilities training sales unit's cross-functional cooperation). Surprisingly, however, we find that a third job resource – that is, a firm's product portfolio depth – actually accentuates, rather than attenuates, the negative effects of market demands on sales force morale. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of our work and by elaborating on exciting avenues for future research in the area.

6. Discussion

Despite that the morale of an organization's sales force can have a substantial impact on salesperson performance (Martin, 2015) as well as the high level of interest from managers in improving morale, three important research questions/gaps remain: (1) What market demands negatively impact sales force morale? (2) What resources can an organization leverage to buffer the negative effects market demands have on sales force morale? and (3) What impact does sales force morale have on key organizational outcome measures? Our study addresses these questions/gaps and contributes to theory and managerial practice in the following ways:

6.1. Theoretical implications

Overall, our research contributes to the JD-R literature by applying JD-R at to a study of organizational level topics. The current research specifically answers a very recent call of Bakker and Demerouti (2018) stated as “we suggest in JD-R theory that well-being and performance are the outcomes of factors at the individual (job function) level but also at the team or even the organizational level. Several studies have provided evidence for such a claim. However, the empirical evidence is still scarce and scattered. We need more empirical evidence regarding whether a factor at the organizational level consistently acts as buffer or exacerbates…well-being” (p. 8). Interestingly, our findings in a sales setting largely support the foundational tenets of JD-R. Yet, as indicated by Bakker and Demerouti (2018) we discover that, indeed, resources can buffer and exacerbate organizational job demands (discussed subsequently in more detail). This finding represents a difference in how job resources have operated in previous research at the individual-level. In addition, our research also adds in more specific ways, described in the following sections.