The effects of formal controls on supervisee trust in the manager in new product selling: Evidence from young and inexperienced salespeople in China

How should sales managers enhance the support and commitment of young, inexperienced sales people during a new product selling? Some scholars have suggested sales managers should use formal controls (i.e., output and process controls) to develop the salespeople's trust in their benevolence. Drawing on a sample of young, inexperienced sales people with rather low education selling new products in China's competitive, volatile, and transitional economic environment, the present study investigates the relationship between output and process controls and supervisee trust (i.e., the salesperson's trust in the sales manager). The empirical results of the study suggest that process and output controls have differential effects on supervisee trust. Specifically, the results indicate that process control enhances supervisee trust by itself and also under conditions of intense training for new product selling and when market volatility is perceived as high. However, process control hinders supervisee trust when the manager is long-term oriented and engages in participative supervision. It was found that output control engenders supervisee trust when the manager is long-term oriented but hinders supervisee trust when salespeople have undergone intensive training for new product selling. Implications of these results are provided for both researchers and practitioners involved in launching and selling new products

Application of X-ray resonant diffraction to structural studies of liquid crystals

Liquid crystals are soft materials that combine the fluidity of disordered liquids and the long range orientational or positional order of crystalline solids along one or two directions of space. X-ray scattering is widely and generally successfully used to investigate and characterize the microscopic structure of most liquid crystals. In many cases however, the Bragg reflections are forbidden by special symmetries of the unit cell and the low dimensional structure of the liquid crystalline phases are out of reach of conventional X-ray experiments. We show in this paper that this problem can be overcome by resonant scattering of X-rays as it reveals the anisotropy of the tensor structure factor. We review various examples in which the restored forbidden reflections reveal unambiguously the hidden structure of liquid crystalline phases. Moreover, we show that in some cases, a fine analysis of the polarization of the Bragg reflections enables one to discriminate between different structural models. These studies solved long standing questions about biaxial liquid crystal structures and provided new insights into physical phenomena such as supercritical behaviour or commensurate-incommensurate transitions