Everyone Loves a Winner…Or Do They? Introducing Envy into a Sales Contest to Increase Salesperson Motivation

This paper focuses on the role that envy can play in driving sales force behavior in competitions. Envy, an unpleasant emotion that occurs when a person covets something that another has, can be used as a motivating tool to push lower-ranked salespeople to better compete with high achievers. Following a review of envy and sales contest effectiveness, potential strategies are provided for implementing benign envy while avoiding the potential negative consequences of envy. Sales managers must be careful to ensure that envy is induced properly to engage the employees while not negatively affecting the long-term health of the sales force

Honor Among Salespeople: Using an Ethical Role Play and Code of Ethics Exercise to Develop an Ethical Framework in a Professional Selling Course

Building on recommendations from both sales educators and the AACSB, the authors propose a three-step approach to assist professors in teaching ethics in a Professional Sales course. An ethics module is presented that consists of an ethics role play, a discussion of “grey area” situations that a salesperson will often experience, and a Code of Ethics written assignment that will allow students to experience, analyze, and reinforce positive ethical behavior in order to help prepare them for sales careers. Following a detailed explanation of each exercise, student feedback is presented to support this multi-faceted ethics program as a valuable contribution to sales education

It Takes Two: Developing a Successful Partnership between Clients and Students in Client-Based Projects

Both faculty and employers are motivated to advance learning beyond the classroom in order to teach skills required by graduates to succeed in business careers. The authors use a client-based project to build a bridge between marketing theory and practice, allowing students to develop their skills within a course while working with a real company. The authors demonstrate how a client-based project can succeed in the classroom with motivating incentives, positive client engagement, and earning real-world experience-all of which positively enhanced students \u27participation, project deliverables, and enjoyment in the class project

Professor Walks into a Bar: Using Humor and Q-Score to Determine Instructor and Department Appeal

Building on existing research on humor in the classroom, the authors propose a research design that examines the effect of humor on a professor\u27s effectiveness in the classroom. The concept of Q-Score is applied to academia, which is a popular rating used by advertisers to measure source attractiveness and determine celebrity appeal. Several factors leading to teaching effectiveness and “favorite prof” status are explored in addition to overall effects of humor in the classroom. This study combines evaluations from popular student-viewed websites, student evaluations, and a Humor Orientation scale. An awareness and application of this metric can assist professors in marketing themselves, the discipline, and the major

Minuscule reverse plane partitions via quiver representations

A nilpotent endomorphism of a quiver representation induces a linear transformation on the vector space at each vertex. Generically among all nilpotent endomorphisms, there is a well-defined Jordan form for these linear transformations, which is an interesting new invariant of a quiver representation. If $Q$ is a Dynkin quiver and $m$ is a minuscule vertex, we show that representations consisting of direct sums of indecomposable representations all including $m$ in their support, the category of which we denote by $\mathcal{C}_{Q,m}$, are determined up to isomorphism by this invariant. We use this invariant to define a bijection from isomorphism classes of representations in $\mathcal{C}_{Q,m}$ to reverse plane partitions whose shape is the minuscule poset corresponding to $Q$ and $m$. By relating the piecewise-linear promotion action on reverse plane partitions to Auslander-Reiten translation in the derived category, we give a uniform proof that the order of promotion equals the Coxeter number. In type $A_n$, we show that special cases of our bijection include the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth and Hillman-Grassl correspondences.Comment: Comments welcom

Invited Essay: Philosophy of Teaching

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