Borgh, van der, W.

Jong, de, A.

Nijssen, E.J.

English

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 Helping teammates during product selling: when does it payoff?Citation for published version (APA):Borgh, van der, W., Jong, de, A., & Nijssen, E. J. (2013). Helping teammates during product selling: when doesit pay off? In A. Rindfleisch, & J. Burroughs (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2013 AMA Winter Marketing Educators’Conference : Challenging the Bounds of Marketing Thought (pp. 143-144). (AMA Winter Educators' Conference- Proceedings; Vol. 24). American Marketing Association (AMA).Document status and date:Published: 01/01/2013Document Version:Publisher’s PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers)Please check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can beimportant differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. Peopleinterested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit theDOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and pagenumbers.Link to publicationGeneral rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal.If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, pleasefollow below link for the End User Agreement:www.tue.nl/taverneTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at:openaccess@tue.nlproviding details and we will investigate your claim.Download date: 05. Oct. 2023American Marketing Association / Winter 2013 143Michel van der Borgh, Eindhoven University of Technology, The NetherlandsAd de Jong, Eindhoven University of Technology, The NetherlandsEd Nijssen, Eindhoven University of Technology, The NetherlandsTeams are important in complex sales environmentsas members can jointly execute tasks by helping andassisting each other (Ahearne et al. 2010a). In a salescontext, individual employees generally are expected toboth help colleagues and have high personal sales pro-ductivity. MacKenzie et al. (MacKenzie et al. 1999,p. 407) contend that “agents who are perceived to be themost effective are also the ones who are not only produc-tive themselves but also make those around them moreproductive as well by helping.” However, while helpingteammates generally is considered beneficial for theperformance of the sales team as a whole (e.g., Ahearneet al. 2010a), research indicates that it may go at expenseof an individual’s own task performance (Barnes et al.2008). Allocating too much time and energy to helpingteammates leads to neglecting individual’s own taskaccomplishment. This is even more likely when sellingnew products. Given its non-routine nature (Ahearne etal. 2010b), helping teammates may take considerablymore time for new products compared to existing prod-ucts (i.e., more routine sales task). As such, a majorchallenge in new product selling is how to combinehelping colleagues and achieving one’s own task perfor-mance effectively. In many sales settings, this is particu-larly problematic as individual rewards dominate teamrewards.We aim to study under what conditions helpingteammates will not harm (but even benefit) an individualsalesperson’s new product selling task accomplishment.Thus, the focus is on the individual salesperson in theteam rather than on sales team’s performance as a whole.We contribute to the literature in the following ways.First, research on frontline employee team effectivenesshas indicated the importance of task and social processesas drivers of team performance (Ahearne et al. 2010a;De Jong and De Ruyter 2004), but no research exists onthe impact of both task and pro-social team behaviors ofthe individual salesperson in the team and how thesebehaviors affect his/her performance. We focus on help-ing, which is the most powerful social behavior (Podsakoffet al. 2000) and on proactive selling (cf., Pitt et al. 2002)as an important task-specific counterpart.Second, while several studies have examined con-tingencies on either team-level process-performance(Ahearne et al. 2010a) or individual-level behavior-performance relationships (e.g., Ahearne et al. 2010b)few studies have considered these contingencies forindividuals operating in team-based setting. We considerteam diversity and task autonomy as moderators.In our conceptual framework of new product selling,we investigate how the task-related (bottom layer of thefigure) and social-related mechanisms (top layer of thefigure) combine in their effect on an individualsalesperson’s sales performance for new products. First,we examine how salesperson’s execution of proactiveselling and helping impact his/her sales performance. Inaddition, our conceptual framework focuses on these twobehaviors as joint predictors of a salesperson’s perfor-mance selling newly developed products in a functionalsales team setting. Second, we analyze the moderatinginfluence of work design characteristics on these twobehavior-performance relationships. In specific, weinclude task autonomy and team diversity in sales expe-rience as moderators.We selected a large information and communica-tions technology (ICT) company to test our hypotheses.The company’s product portfolio consists of ICT prod-ucts, such as workspace management systems, connec-tivity solutions, and datacenters. The company understudy markets products to the top 500 companies inEurope. Individual salespersons were organized in teamsexclusively consisting of salespersons dealing with aparticular customer type and technical specialty/product.The set of new products studied in this research wereintroduced in the last twelve months prior to the survey.The data used in this study consisted of two datasources, collected data over two periods. In the firstperiod, salesperson data were collected using a survey.This survey rendered 211 usable responses from 289employees (response rate = 73%) from 31 units. In thesecond period – 6 months after distribution of the sur-vey – we obtained each individual salesperson’s salesresults from company records. We operationalize all thelatent constructs using existing scales (see Table 1). Sales144 American Marketing Association / Winter 2013experience reflects salespersons’ total years of relevantsales experience. Team diversity in sales experience wasoperationalized using the standard deviation. Sales per-formance for new products was an objective measure,which was defined as the actual revenue generated withthe sale of new products by an individual salesperson.We analyzed the data in two successive stages: (1)exploratory factor analysis and (2) confirmatory factoranalysis. All scales have sufficient reliability, with com-posite reliabilities varying between .76 and .94. Thevariance extracted exceeded the .50 threshold for eachconstruct, in support of convergent validity. Further-more, the constructs had discriminant validity as thevariance extracted exceeds the average variance sharedwith any other study construct. As the data had a multi-level structure we relied on multilevel regression analy-ses. We standardized the variables before entering themin the analyses to mitigate multicollinearity between theinteraction terms and constituent parts. The maximumvariance inflation factors (VIF) were all less than 2.4,indicating an absence of serious multicollinearity.The key objective of our study was to analyze underwhat conditions helping colleagues adds to one’s owntask accomplishment. First, our results reveal that a jointhelping and proactive selling effort increases perfor-mance. Helping makes a salesperson’s proactive sellingefforts more effective. In addition, the direction of theeffect of helping on performance is fully contingent onthe degree of proactive selling. If proactive selling is low,helping does not benefit the helper him/herself. In con-trast, if proactive selling is high the helper clearly ben-efits. This study validates previous suggestions that themost effective salespeople are those that combine help-ing and task productivity (MacKenzie et al. 1999). Sec-ond, our findings indicate that team diversity in salesexperience has a differential moderating effect on proac-tive selling and helping as predictors of sales perfor-mance. Our results show that a helper only benefits himor herself when working in a diverse team in terms ofsales experience. In addition, team diversity in salesexperience compensates for low levels of proactive sell-ing and that sometimes proactive selling even is notneeded. This result nuances conclusions of previousresearch that salespeople need to be proactive whenselling new products (Atuahene-Gima 1997), Finally,our results report no moderating effects of taskautonomy. Instead, task autonomy has a direct negativeand non-linear effect on an individual’s sales perfor-mance for new products. This is consistent with recentfindings in a service setting, where Marinova et al. (2008)demonstrate that autonomy hurts performance effective-ness of service employees as it causes unnecessary vari-ability, slows the speed of service delivery, and increasesemployees’ cognitive burden for task selection and strat-egy. Future research should examine this effect. Refer-ences are available upon request.For further information contact:Michel van der BorghDepartment of Industrial Engineering & Innovation SciencesEindhoven University of TechnologyP.O. Box 5135600 MB EindhovenThe NetherlandsE-Mail: w.v.d.borgh@tue.nl

Helping teammates during product selling: when does it pay off?

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Helping teammates during product selling: when does it pay off?

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