Until now, sales researchers have not done any empirical work in the area of deviant workplace behavior. This is surprising, given that recent survey data suggest deviant salesperson behavior is running rampant out in the field: 60 percent of sales managers have caught their reps cheating on...

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...

Given the importance of new products, firms may be prone to “over-manage” sales personnel by using behavior-based control systems that dictate the performance of particular activities related to the introduction. Such controls may be especially tempting given that favorable salesperson...

A manufacturer’s success in the marketplace is contingent in part on its ability to energize its downstream channel members in support of its brands. Gaining the focused effort of the reseller’s sales personnel is particularly important, and this has become increasingly challenging as...

This study examines the diffusion of market orientation as a social learning process to acquire and transfer individual-level market orientation. Central to the diffusion are important work-group members, or envoys. Through their market-oriented action, top managers serve as market-oriented role...

This article presents an empirical test of organizational identification in the context of customer–company (C-C) relationships. It investigates whether customers identify with companies and what the antecedents and consequences of such identification are. The model posits that perceived...

We investigate the linear and interactive influences of leader-empowering behaviors, team experience, and the degree of virtuality on team planning processes and performance among virtual sales teams. Collecting data across three separate time periods with 218 pharmaceutical sales teams, our...

Sales force performance is predominant in the B2B marketing literature. This chapter reviews how sales force performance has been defined, operationalized and measured. By providing a typology of sales force performance along two dimensions - namely positive versus negative performance and...

Drawing from the social information processing approach, the authors develop a contingency framework that captures organizational identification (OI) diffusion through two key interpersonal influencers, supervisors and expert peers. In two multi-level studies in two countries, results...