Better together: Trait competitiveness and competitive psychological climate as antecedents of salesperson organizationa
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Better together: Trait competitiveness and competitive psychological climate as antecedents of salesperson organizational commitment and sales performance Wyatt A. Schrock & Douglas E. Hughes & Frank Q. Fu & Keith A. Richards & Eli Jones
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract This study assesses the direct and interactive effects of trait competitiveness and competitive psychological climate on organizational commitment and sales performance using data collected from industrial salespeople and company records. Findings indicate that the positive impact of trait competitiveness on sales performance is contingent upon a highly competitive psychological climate, helping to explain inconsistent findings in the literature and underscoring the need for firms to manage the fit between salespeople and organizational culture. Additionally, the study reveals continuance commitment’s negative moderation of the affective commitment–sales performance relationship. Taken together, the model reveals an interesting process such that managers should recruit salespeople with high trait competitiveness and foster a competitive climate internally to generate the best sales performance outcomes. W. A. Schrock : D. E. Hughes Broad College of Business, Michigan State University, N370 North Business Complex, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA W. A. Schrock e-mail: [email protected] D. E. Hughes e-mail: [email protected] F. Q. Fu College of Business Administration, University of Missouri, One University Blvd., Saint Louis, MO 63121, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. A. Richards (*) College of Business, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 615 McCallie Ave., Chattanooga, TN 37403, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. Jones Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, Business Building 301, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Mark Lett
Keywords Salesperson performance . Traitcompetitiveness . Competitive psychological climate . Organizational commitment Many sales managers foster competition to raise motivation and performance among salespeople (Krishnan et al. 2002). Competition-stimulating tactics include recruiting competitive salespeople and administering sales contests (Syam et al. 2013). In addition, salespeople compete amongst themselves for compensation, promotion, recognition, and status. Thus, intra-firm competition manifests at both individual and organizational levels. The former refers to personal characteristics (e.g., trait competitiveness) and the latter to company characteristics (e.g., competitive psychological climate). Unfortunately, research on the effects of these variables on the sales force remains equivocal. For example, the relationship between trait competitiveness and sales performance has been directly positive (Brown and Peterson 1994), non-significant (Brown et al. 1998), and only indirectly positive (Krishnan et al. 2002). At the same time, competitive psychological climate research remains scarce. Although Brown et al. (1998) revealed its relationshi
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