Boundary Spanning Elements and the Marketing Function in Organizations by Sunil Sahadev Keyoor Purani & Neeru Malhotra

Boundary Spanning Elements and the Marketing Function in Organizations by Sunil Sahadev Keyoor Purani & Neeru Malhotra

Author:Sunil Sahadev, Keyoor Purani & Neeru Malhotra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham


Goal Orientation and Role Conflict

Role conflict is defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other” (Kahn et al. 1964, p. 19). In any personal selling context sales persons frequently face conflicting demands both from the customer side as well as from the management through the sales supervisor. Such conflicting demand can lead to situations where it becomes very difficult to satisfy both the sides leading to role-conflict. In fact complying with either of the conflicting sets of demands could lead to short-term failure. However based on control theory, sales persons high in learning orientation have a long-term perspective and have a superordinate goal of mastering tasks that have a long-term orientation (Kohli et al. 1998; Harris et al. 2005). Salespersons who therefore have a learning orientation are not necessarily distracted from potential short-term failures. Moreover, learning orientation too often involves a focused mindset towards learning skills and improving abilities—a mentality that enables salespersons to be not excessively distracted by conflicting pressures.On the contrary as Sujan et al. (1994) contends, sales persons who have high performance orientation are focussed on short-term results. Excessive performance orientation could also lead to higher levels of self-awareness (Kanfer 1992). When the individual sales persons have high Self-awareness, he/she attaches greater importance to the individual’s performance appraisal without necessarily meeting customer needs. Such an orientation leads to situations where customer’s needs often conflicts with the priorities of the sales person (Harris et al. 2005) which leads to role-conflict. Thus, sales persons with higher levels of performance orientation will face greater role conflict and sales persons with higher learning orientation faces less levels of role conflict.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.