a Team Lead. Coordinated the efforts of their team members to workshop ideas and develop initial drafts. Subsequently, teams leads worked together to develop a coherent and integrated article for submission. Team leads contributed equally to the development of the final submission. b Individual team member. Team members contributed equally and are listed alphabetically by last name.

Despite a long history of independent sales and service functions within organizations, customers are pressuring organizations to rethink their sales and service operations. Specifically, customers expect organizations to offer a “single face” of the firm rather than being forced to interact with multiple agents across both sales and service throughout their relationships. As firms attempt to meet these customer demands, they have countless options to integrate sales and service operations, but little is known about which strategies are most effective. This article attempts to shed new light into the challenges and potential benefits of sales-service integration, in an effort to spur research in this area and better inform this managerial challenge. Specifically, we formalize the concept of the sales-service interface, discuss how it relates to sales-service ambidexterity, and identify several opportunities for future research. Given the complexity of the sales-service interface, we contend that future researchers must view these issues through a multilevel lens and, as a result, we focus on identifying opportunities ideally suited for testing in a multilevel environment. The goal of this article is to provide a platform for researchers to tackle this challenging problem and generate new insights into how best to meet customer’s evolving demands.

The influence of a firm's cause-related marketing efforts on sales representative attitudes and behavioral performance is investigated. Results from a field study indicate that the influence of a representative's construed customer attitude toward the cause campaign on selling behavioral performance is mediated through cognitive identification and selling confidence. Further, the influence of construed customer attitude toward the campaign on selling confidence is moderated by cognitive identification such that the effects are stronger for salespeople with lower levels of identification with the company. The authors discuss the implications of the research and offer directions for further research.Keywords Cause-related marketing efforts . Selling confidence . Customer attitude Over the past two decades, corporate social responsibility (CSR) increasingly has been recognized by scholars and utilized by managers as a viable business tool and a potential source of sustainable competitive advantage (e.g., Cone et al. 2003). Charitable giving by corporations reached approximately $13.77 billion in 2005 in the USA alone (American Association of Fundraising Counsel 2006). Further, a growing body of academic research considers the influence of CSR on a variety of consumerrelated outcomes ranging from receptiveness to new products (Brown and Dacin 1997) to consumers' inferences about other individuals (Yoon et al. 2006).The influence of CSR on important audiences other than consumers, however, has remained largely unexplored, in spite of calls for greater focus on these groups (e.g., Drumwright 1996). Our research focuses on how a company's CSR-related promotional campaign, directed at consumers, can have important effects among members of the sales force, a key internal constituency. We deepen the CSR research stream by replacing the broad idea that CSR efforts will enhance insider morale with a model that depicts and tests (a) specific mediational paths through which salespersons' beliefs about customers' attitudes toward a CSR promotional campaign (i.e., construed customer attitude toward the cause campaign [CCA campaign ]) influence their behavioral performance with respect to selling, and (b) a key moderating condition on the influences of CCA campaign .In the following section, we discuss CSR, in particular focusing on cause-related marketing as one common application of CSR. Next, we develop a conceptual model that connects sales representative CCA campaign with behavioral performance. Finally, we present and discuss the results of a field study involving independent sales consultants working with a direct selling company that provide support for our hypotheses.

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A social network analysis of eighty-nine midlevel health care professionals showed that middle managers' strategic knowledge is positively associated with championing alternative ideas and synthesizing new information for upper management. In addition, the relationship between knowledge and middle management strategic activities in informal networks is moderated by the manager's social position.