We investigate the effect of conditions that create technostress, on technology-enabled innovation, technology-enabled performance and overall performance. We further look at the role of technology self-efficacy, organizational mechanisms that inhibit technostress and technology competence as possible mitigations to the effects of technostress creators. Our findings show a negative association between technostress creators and performance. We find that, while traditional effort-based mechanisms such as building technology competence reduce the impact of technostress creators on technology-enabled innovation and performance, more empowering mechanisms such as developing technology self-efficacy and information systems (IS) literacy enhancement and involvement in IS initiatives are required to counter the decrease in overall performance because of technostress creators. Noting that the professional sales context offers increasingly high expectations for technology-enabled performance in an inherently interpersonal-oriented and relationship-oriented environment with regard to overall performance, and high failure rates for IS acceptance/use, the study uses survey data collected from 237 institutional sales professionals.
The authors investigate the effects of loyalty programs on loyalty to packaged goods brands. Findings from a series of experiments indicate that the incentive that is offered in a loyalty program is important to whether the program succeeds or fails at building brand loyalty. The data reported suggest that incentives that have overlap with brand associations, which the authors term cue-compatible incentives, can prompt rehearsal that increases the accessibility of favorable brand associations. This, in turn, helps boost postprogram loyalty. At the same time, incentives that are tangible or concrete can undermine postprogram loyalty. This seems to occur because elaboration is attracted to the incentive at the expense of the brand. Incentive associations may thus gain in accessibility and interfere with access to brand associations.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of sales performance measurement by developing an organizing framework for classifying sales performance measures based on the various performance criteria used by researchers. Subsequently, the results of both a focus group and in‐depth interviews with sales managers and salespeople will be presented using the classification framework developed. The objective is to determine whether gaps exist between how researchers and practitioners view and classify salesperson performance measures as well as to provide insights to effective sales management practices in areas such as salesperson skill development, goal attainment, resource allocation, and customer relationship management.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study, using in‐depth interviews, explores the relationship between sales managers and salespersons and their respective views on sales performance measurement. The interview questions were developed using information derived from a sales executive focus group. In‐person in‐depth interviews were conducted with eight sales managers and eight salespeople from eight organizations.FindingsThe paper proposes a new method for organizing the types of performance measures that are used, crossing effectiveness‐efficiency with internally‐externally‐focused measures. The findings indicate that a gap appears to remain between the attributes of performance that researchers focus on and what occurs in the world of sales.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings suggest that sales control theories can be used to present an organizing framework of sales performance based on sales outputs, salesperson skill/capability development, sales activities, and market indicators. Our typology might serve as a way to better understand certain research areas where there have been inconsistent findings, and should lead to new measure development for empirical research. In addition, a number of manager and salesperson recommendations for the practicing sales manager are reviewed.Originality/valueThis paper helps to clarify an area that is characterized by ambiguity and an identified need to identify new performance metrics.
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