The influence of formal and informal sales controls on customer-directed selling behaviors and sales unit effectiveness

Adaptive selling (AS) and customer-oriented selling (COS) constitute two key customer-directed selling behaviors for the success of the modern sales force. However, knowledge regarding the organizational factors that can induce salespeople to engage in those behaviors is strikingly limited. Against this background, we develop a comprehensive model that delineates the influences of formal and informal sales controls on AS and COS and, through them, on sales unit effectiveness. Based on a sample of sales managers in a major European Union country, we present new evidence that (a) formal and informal sales controls exert differential impact on salespeople's AS and COS behaviors; (b) AS directly and positively influences sales unit effectiveness; (c) COS affects sales unit effectiveness only indirectly, i.e. by fostering AS; and (d) outcome and cultural controls directly improve sales unit effectiveness. We conclude with a discussion of our findings for academics and practitioners.

Long-term Success of Family Firms: Investigating Specific Aspects of Firm-level Entrepreneurship and Individual-level Antecedents

Long-term success of family firms is of utmost social and economic importance. Three of its determinants are in the center of this Dissertation: firmlevel entrepreneurial orientation (EO), managers' entrepreneurial behavior, and value-creating attitudes of non-family employees. Each determinant and respective research gaps are addressed by one paper of this cumulative dissertation. Referring to firm-level EO, scholars claim that EO is a main antecedent to firms' both short- and long-term success. However, family firms seem to be successful across generations despite rather low levels of EO. The first paper addresses this paradox by investigating EO patterns of long-lived family firms in three Swiss case studies. The main finding is that the key to success is not to be as entrepreneurially as possible all the time, but to continuously adapt the EO profile depending on internal and external factors. Moreover, the paper suggest new subcategories to different EO dimensions. With regard to entrepreneurial behavior of managers, there is a lack of knowledge how individual-level and organizational level factors affect its evolvement. The second paper addresses this gap by investigating a sample of 403 middle-level managers from both family and non-family firms. It introduces psychological ownership of managers as individual-level antecedent and investigates the interaction with organizational factors. As a central insight, management support is found to strengthen the psychological ownership-entrepreneurial behavior relationship. The third paper is based on the fact that employees' justice perceptions are established antecedents of value-creating employee attitudes such as affective commitment and job satisfaction. Even though family firms are susceptible to nonfamily employees´ perceptions of injustice, corresponding research is scarce. Moreover, the mechanism connecting justice perceptions and positive outcomes is still unclear. Addressing these gaps, the analysis of a sample of 310 non-family employees reveals that psychological ownership is a mediator in the relationships between distributive justice perceptions and both affective commitment and job satisfaction. Altogether, the three papers offer valuable contributions to family business literature with respect to EO, entrepreneurial behavior, and value-creating employee attitudes. Thus, they increase current understanding about important determinants of family firms' long-term success, while opening up numerous ways of future research.

Does the (structural) context matter? Analysing individual and structural factors of members’ commitment to sports clubs

Introduction: Over the last decades, Swiss sports clubs have lost their "monopoly" in the market for sports-related services and increasingly are in competition with other sports providers. For many sport clubs long-term membership cannot be seen as a matter of course. Current research on sports clubs in Switzerland – as well as for other European countries – confirms the increasing difficulties in achieving long-term member commitment. Looking at recent findings of the Swiss sport clubs report (Lamprecht, Fischer & Stamm, 2012), it can be noted, that a decrease in memberships does not equally affect all clubs. There are sports clubs – because of their specific situational and structural conditions – that have few problems with member fluctuation, while other clubs show considerable declines in membership. Therefore, a clear understanding of individual and structural factors that trigger and sustain member commitment would help sports clubs to tackle this problem more effectively. This situation poses the question: What are the individual and structural determinants that influence the tendency to continue or to quit the membership? Methods: Existing research has extensively investigated the drivers of members’ commitment at an individual level. As commitment of members usually occurs within an organizational context, the characteristics of the organisation should be also considered. However, this context has been largely neglected in current research. This presentation addresses both the individual characteristics of members and the corresponding structural conditions of sports clubs resulting in a multi-level framework for the investigation of the factors of members’ commitment in sports clubs. The multilevel analysis grant a adequate handling of hierarchically structured data (e.g., Hox, 2002). The influences of both the individual and context level on the stability of memberships are estimated in multi-level models based on a sample of n = 1,434 sport club members from 36 sports clubs. Results: Results of these multi-level analyses indicate that commitment of members is not just an outcome of individual characteristics, such as strong identification with the club, positively perceived communication and cooperation, satisfaction with sports clubs’ offers, or voluntary engagement. It is also influenced by club-specific structural conditions: stable memberships are more probable in rural sports clubs, and in clubs that explicitly support sociability, whereas sporting-success oriented goals in clubs have a destabilizing effect. Discussion/Conclusion: The proposed multi-level framework and the multi-level analysis can open new perspectives for research concerning commitment of members to sports clubs and other topics and problems of sport organisation research, especially in assisting to understand individual behavior within organizational contexts. References: Hox, J. J. (2002). Multilevel analysis: Techniques and applications. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lamprecht, M., Fischer, A., & Stamm, H.-P. (2012). Die Schweizer Sportvereine – Strukturen, Leistungen, Herausforderungen. Zurich: Seismo.