Bart Dietz

Advancing Sales Performance Research: A Focus on Five UnderResearched Topic Areas

This paper focuses on five critical, yet underresearched, areas vital to sales performance in a marketplace that is increasingly more complex, more demanding of customized solutions, and more relationship focused. The five topic areas addressed are the ability to marshal intraorganizational resources by salespeople, salesperson creativity, examining the buyer–seller interaction in terms of salesperson influence tactics behaviors and the importance of establishing credibility with buyers as a basis of influence, ethics relative to the buying and selling organization simultaneously, and selling teams. Research implications for each topic area are advanced.

Outperforming whom? A multilevel study of performance-prove goal orientation, performance, and the moderating role of shared team identification.

Performance-prove goal orientation affects performance because it drives people to try to outperform others. A proper understanding of the performance-motivating potential of performance-prove goal orientation requires, however, that we consider the question of whom people desire to outperform. In a multilevel analysis of this issue, we propose that the shared team identification of a team plays an important moderating role here, directing the performance-motivating influence of performance-prove goal orientation to either the team level or the individual level of performance. A multilevel study of salespeople nested in teams supports this proposition, showing that performance-prove goal orientation motivates team performance more with higher shared team identification, whereas performance-prove goal orientation motivates individual performance more with lower shared team identification. Establishing the robustness of these findings, a second study replicates them with individual and team performance in an educational context.

HRM Policies and Firm Performance: The Role of the Synergy of Policies

For both academics and practitioners, an insight into the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and performance is essential. In exploring this link, HRM scholars have arrived at a point where the universalistic approach of the performance effects of best HRM practices are criticized. In an effort to move beyond a best-practice mode of theorizing, scholars have proposed different bundles of HRM practices that relate to better performance (Huselid, 1995). An emerging stream of literature proposes that systems of HRM practices have synergic performance effects (e.g. Delery & Doty, 1996). Scholars from the latter research stream argue that systems of HRM practices in so called ‘High Performance Work Systems’ (HRM Systems) lead to significant effects on firm performance, and hence propose that ‘ideal’ systems of HRM practices (i.e. best-systems) lead to superior firm performance (Becker & Huselid, 1998). Against this backdrop, Delery and Doty (1996) called upon scholars to adopt a ‘configurational mode of theorizing’ and indeed sparked a plethora of research in search of ideal-type HRM systems (Becker & Huselid, 1998; Lepak et al., 2006). Taking stock of this field today, its theoretical and empirical advancement is still hindered by ‘deficient empirical support’, in part because researchers have focused on bundles of large numbers of practices. For instance, Guest et al. (2003) identified 48 HRM practices and grouped them into nine HRM domains, but concluded that these formed no coherent factors. Also, measuring and examining the interactions between large numbers of practices is empirically very complex (Martin-Alcazar, Romero-Fernandez & Sanches-Gardey, 2005: 645). Individual practices’ interactions with many variables are not as easily empirically testable. Some 20 years after the emergence of the perspective of HRM configurations, this perspective has yet to deliver on its promise.

Outperforming Whom? A Multi-Level Study of How Performance-Prove Goal Orientation Manifests in Sales Performance in a Context of Shared Team Identification

Performance-prove goal orientation (PPGO) affects job performance because it drives people to outperform others. However, up to the present study, an important question that has remained unanswered by researchers is: whom do people desire to outperform? The authors argue that the shared team identification of a sales team influences which others salespeople, nested in that sales team, aspire to outperform. The study shows that the PPGO-job performance relationship is context-contingent on shared team identification. The results reveal that this interaction manifests in contrasting ways on individual vis-a-vis team level as it shows opposite effects: to attain higher levels of salesperson performance, a high PPGO is beneficial for salespeople nested in sales teams with low shared team identification. In contrast, to enhance sales team performance, a high mean PPGO of salespeople is advantageous when the sales team is characterized by high shared team identification. These findings imply that a PPGO may help, but can also hurt job performance of salespeople.