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Studies have shown that customer orientation has a substantial impact on a business's success. This study examines the effects of positive personality on salespeople's proactive customer orientation (PCO) and responsive customer orientation (RCO) by incorporating the effects of job enthusiasm and transformational leadership.

A questionnaire survey is conducted. A total of 511 questionnaires are received from Taiwan's life insurance salespeople. Partial least squares (PLS) regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that positive personality influences PCO and RCO both directly and indirectly through job enthusiasm. The effect of transformational leadership is also found to be significant. Financial service companies should be concerned about the important role of positive personality and transformational leadership in promoting job enthusiasm, PCO and RCO among salespeople.

Previous studies mostly focused on the direct relationship between customer orientation and organizational outcomes, neglecting the role of individual personality. This gap leaves us wondering how a positive personality influences a salesperson's proactive and responsive customer orientation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the mechanisms of a positive personality, job enthusiasm, and transformational leadership on salespeople's PCO and RCO.

This study explores the mediating effects of relationship marketing orientation (RMO) and service quality orientation (SQO) on market orientation, selling orientation, and policyholder retention in non-life insurance services. Additionally, it offers important recommendations for non-life insurers in Taiwan for policy development and improving policyholder retention.

Data were collected from a sample of policyholders belonging to the top five non-life insurance companies in Taiwan. The data were then analyzed with structural equation modeling.

RMO and SQO mediate the effects of the salesperson’s market orientation on policyholder retention. Thus, RMO and SQO are key factors influencing policyholder retention. Consequently, high levels of market orientation should be maintained to increase RMO and SQO, strengthening the retention rate of non-life insurance policyholders.

The main limitation of this study is its cross-sectional nature. In the future, researchers should collect data from other countries and service industries (e.g. banks, securities, and other financial institutions), expand to different insurance contexts (e.g. life insurance), and conduct longitudinal studies or experimental research.

The results of this study can act as a guide for providers of non-life insurance services. Based on the research results, we recommend decision-makers pay increased attention to increasing policyholder retention rates by strengthening their firm’s RMO and SQO.

Few studies have investigated the relationships among market orientation, selling orientation, RMO, SQO, and policyholder retention in non-life insurance services within Asian contexts in general and specifically in Taiwan. Thus, this study’s theoretical contributions, managerial implications (especially for decision-makers), and the proposed future research directions represent timely and valuable additions to the literature.

This article aims to provide knowledge on the antecedents and consequences of individual proactive behaviour. The proposed research model includes two unexplored antecedents (experienced meaningfulness of work and industry competitive intensity) and one consequence (individual proficiency).

Data were collected from 297 salespeople working at 105 enterprises in a range of industries. Data analysis was performed by applying confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

The results show (1) a positive association between industry competitive intensity and salespeople’s experienced meaningfulness of work and their proactivity at work; (2) a positive relationship between salespeople’s proactive behaviour and their individual proficiency and (3) that salespeople’s proactivity mediates the relation between industry competitive intensity and the experienced meaningfulness of work and individual proficiency.

The results suggest that managers could stimulate proactive behaviour by increasing the experienced meaningfulness of work. They also indicate that it is not only individual factors that are relevant in stimulating proactive behaviour at work, as contextual factors (particularly external ones) can also influence individual decisions with regard to engaging or not in proactive behaviour. Our findings regarding the positive relationship between proactivity and proficiency would help managers to encourage salespeople’s proactive behaviour.

This study aims to help uncover corporate culture and values to attract and retain talent by understanding job reviews written by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople.

Over 40,000 job reviews on Glassdoor.com are analyzed by a dictionary-based content analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015), to explore the links between corporate culture and linguistics characteristics of reviews as articulated by B2B salespeople. This study adopted a multidimensional scaling approach based on the nine cultural value scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on this map uncovers differences in language patterns and emotions expressed across the profiles.

Findings reveal a map of corporate profiles with two dimensions, namely, product-centricity and customer-centricity, that divide salesforce subculture into a 2 × 2 matrix of four types: Empathic Innovators, Product Pioneers, Customer Champions and Commodity Traders.

This study combined two data sets, scores on CultureX’s nine cultural values (agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance and respect) and job reviews on Glassdoor.com. This research seeks to develop profiles of the organizational culture and to use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This study adds to the literature on salesforce subculture and showcases a solution to the methodological difficulty in categorizing and measuring culture.

This paper aims to explore the increasing importance of the intraorganizational dimension of the sales role (IDSR) based on service-ecosystem theory. Specifically, it examines how firms can improve interactions both internally and with external actors and stakeholders to both create and sustain advantageous “thin crossing points” (Hartmann et al. 2018). Academic research on sales ecosystems has yet to fully harness the rich insights and potential afforded by the crossing-point perspective.

After developing and unpacking the paper’s guiding conceptual framework (Figure 1), the authors focus on crossing points and the diversity of interactions between the contemporary sales force and its many stakeholders. They examine the sales literature, identify opportunities for thinning sales crossing points and propose dozens of research questions and needs.

The paper examines the importance of improving interactions both within and outside the vendor firm to thin crossing points, further develops the concept of the “sales ecosystem” and contributes a series of important research questions for future examination.

The paper focuses on applying “thick” and “thin” crossing points, a key element of Hartman et al. (2018). The primary limitation of the paper is that it focuses solely on the crossing-points perspective and does not consider other applications of Hartman et al. (2018).

This work informs managers of the need to improve interactions both within and outside the firm by thinning crossing points. Improving relationships with stakeholders will improve many vendor firm and customer outcomes, including performance.

Integrating findings from the literature, the authors propose a conceptual framework to encompass the entire diversity of idiosyncratic interactions as well as long-term relationships the sales force experiences. They discuss the strategic importance of thinning crossing points as well as the competitive disadvantages, even peril, “thick” crossing points create. They propose an ambitious research agenda based on dozens of questions to drive further examination of the IDSR from a sales-ecosystem perspective.

This paper aims to identify and report the differential effects of activity control and capability control on role stressors, which subsequently affect salespeople’s job satisfaction and sales performance.

Drawing on job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, the authors defined active control and customer demandingness as the job demands and capability control as the job resource, and designed their relationship with role stressors, which are indicated as role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload. The authors enrolled a sample of 223 industrial salespeople from pharmaceutical companies. After collecting the data, the authors used structural equation modeling using AMOS to test and estimate causal relationships along with a two-step approach to examine the interaction effect. The authors have also tested the simple slope of two-way interactions. All of the measured variables were identical to those used in previous studies.

The study findings indicate that behavior-based control can be counterproductive. Reducing activity control can decrease role stress, increase job satisfaction and improve job performance; increasing capability control, however, can reduce role stress and increase job satisfaction and performance. It is also important to acknowledge the external environment of the sales context in which behavior-based control is most effective: whereas high customer demandingness and capability control are related to reduced role stress, high customer demandingness and activity control are related to increased role stress.

Sales managers should recognize that different control management regimes reinforce or mitigate salespeople’s job stressors and outcomes under specific conditions (i.e. work environments marked by higher or lower customer demandingness).

Drawing on JD-R theory, the research shows that a behavior control (i.e. activity control and capability control) has differential, and even opposite, psychological consequences.

Sales organizations embrace technological innovation. However, salespeople’s willingness to use new technology influences a firm’s return on investment, representing a significant concern for the organization. These concerns highlight tensions regarding the tradeoffs associated with technology implementations. The purpose of this study is to offer insights that help reduce the complexities of sales technology (ST) by exploring the changing dynamics of contemporary business relationships.

This paper synthesizes the ST literature using the service ecosystem perspective to propose the sales techno-ecosystem (STE) framework, providing new insights into organizational decision-making related to the ongoing digital transformation of sales tasks.

This synthesis of the ST literature with the service ecosystem seeks to clarify the impact of technology within the evolving nature of buyer–seller relationships by providing four unique perspectives.

Perspective 1 reviews the sales-service ecosystem framework and develops the theoretical underpinnings and relevant terminologies. Perspective 2 summarizes critical aspects of the ST literature and provides foundations for future research in the STE. Perspective 3 offers a more granular view, explicating roles and contexts prevalent in buyer–seller–technology interactions. Perspective 4 provides a set of tenets and advances research questions related to each tenet.

The culmination of these four perspectives is the introduction of five key tenants designed to help guide strategy and research.

The paper advances Hartmann et al. (2018) service ecosystem paradigm by explicating critical aspects of its ST domain to generate insights for theory and practice.

Conceptual and empirical research over the past 20 years has moved the social media (SM) literature beyond the embryotic stage to a well-developed academic discipline. As the lead article in the special issue in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing on Cutting-Edge Research in Social Media and Interactive Marketing, this review and agenda article has two key goals: (1) to review key SM and interactive marketing research over the past three years and (2) to identify the next wave of high priority challenges and research opportunities.

Given the “cutting-edge” research focus of the special issue, this review and research agenda paper focused on articles published in 25 key marketing journals between January 2021 and March 2024. Initially, the search request was for articles with “social media, social selling, social commerce” located in the article title, author-selected key words and journal-selected keywords. Later, we conducted searches based on terminology from articles presented in the final review. In total, over 1,000 articles were reviewed across the 25 journals, plus additional ones that were cited in those journals that were not on the initial list.

Our review uncovered eight key content areas: (1) data sources, methodology and scale development; (2) emergent SM technologies; (3) artificial intelligence; (4) virtual reality; (5) sales and sales management; (6) consumer welfare; (7) influencer marketing; and (8) social commerce. Table I provides a summer of key articles and research findings for each of the content areas.

As a literature review and research agenda article, this paper is one of the most extensive to date on SM marketing, and particularly with regard to emergent research over the past three years. Recommendations for future research are integrated through the paper and summarized in Figure 2.

Consumer welfare is one of the eight emergent content areas uncovered in the literature review. Specific focus is on SM privacy, misinformation, mental health and misbehavior.

Being clear and specific on what moderating and/or mediating variables are included and what effects are observed in academic research helps the reader to better understand the academic research context and results. But in terms of managerial relevance, it is also important to do this in a way that it provides descriptive, goal and operational relevance to decision makers in practice, depending on the type of intended research. This article wants to provide “a question-based step-by-step guide” on how to make the analysis of moderating/mediating variables and their observed effects more managerially relevant.

Based on a critical review of the literature, important criteria of managerial relevance are confronted with important aspects of theory building with respect to mediating and moderating effects, leading to best-practice insights and recommendations. Moreover, exemplary articles are used to illustrate these findings.

The insights and step-by-step recommendations assist the academic researcher in making choices when analyzing moderators and mediators, by not only taking a theoretical perspective, but also a managerial (relevance) perspective. Adding moderators/mediators may for instance challenge the “core logic of managerial practice” (in terms of thinking and decision making), even if it does not change the “core logic of a theory” as such. In the other direction, academics (and their theory) may be challenged by practitioners, in the way they define moderators/mediators and their levels. The steps in this article relate to aspects such as measurability, controllability and role of moderators and mediators in managerial problem and decision contexts. In case of multiple moderating and/or mediating variables, the decision architecture for managers becomes more complex, especially when the effects are countervailing/opposite. Multiple studies in this article illustrate that in that case, making optimal decisions becomes a “balancing” act for managers/decision makers and may even challenge their common beliefs (e.g. linear thinking).

The guidelines on managerial relevance of moderating and/or mediating variables and their effects can be used by academic researchers and editors of academic journals, pursuing not only academic rigor, but also managerial relevance. Besides being a guide for managerially relevant output, it also helps in determining for which questions in the research process, input from practitioners or at least insights from practice (e.g. through sources such as business magazines and portals) may be needed. The guidelines may also be used for teaching purposes, complementing more theoretical articles that mainly focus on methodological/statistical issues of moderating/mediating variables and their effects.

Trust is an important facilitator of successful B2B relationships. The purpose of this study is to investigate affect-based antecedents of both interpersonal and interorganizational trust, and their impact on the performance of buyer–supplier relationships. The authors ask two research questions: (1) What are affect-based dimensions of interpersonal and interorganizational trust? (2) How do interpersonal and interorganizational trust influence buyers’ operational performance?

The authors use data from an original survey of 156 buyer–supplier relationships between multinational enterprise subsidiaries and local suppliers in the Thai manufacturing sector to develop a structural model in which the authors test the hypotheses.

Consistent with social exchange theory and social psychology, the empirical analysis shows that affect-based dimensions at the individual level, namely, likeability, similarity and frequent social contact, and at the organizational level, namely, supplier firm willingness to customize and institutionalization of cooperation, are important for establishing trust. In addition, interpersonal trust enhances buyers’ operational performance indirectly via interorganizational trust.

Buying and selling firms may develop organizational trust by developing processes that enhance organizational trust. Individuals with purchasing or sales responsibilities may enhance trust in their personal relationship. However, such interpersonal trust needs to be translated to the organizational level to benefit organizational performance.

The findings contribute to the literature on affect-based antecedents and outcomes of trust. Specifically, the authors offer theory and empirical evidence regarding the contribution of salespersons toward affect-based dimensions of trust and its impact on buyer’s operational performance.