نقش وضعیت و سبک رهبری در رقابت های فروش: آزمایش زمینه طبیعی The role of status and leadership style in sales contests: A natural field experiment

1. Introduction Organizations need to motivate their employees to interact with customers, explore their needs, and sell solutions that fit these needs. In general, incentives and managers’ leadership behavior can motivate employees to engage in such interactions with customers (e.g., Jaworski & Kohli, 1993). In this regard, researchers have proposed to bring competition inside the firm and let salespeople compete against each other by introducing sales contests (e.g., Kalra & Shi, 2001; Lim, Ahearne, & Ham, 2009). Yet, such contests need to be designed well to avoid undesirable side effects such as unethical sales behavior (e.g., Hampton, 1970; Li & Murphy, 2012). From a theoretical point of view, more recently sales contests have been investigated from a tournament theory perspective which argues that status in combination with a monetary incentive built into winning a contest (financial/status reward) has a great impact on participants’ work efforts and sales performance (e.g., Lazear, 1997, p. 225). Others argue that, as it is the preference for status that drives performance (Heffetz & Frank, 2009),the financial reward component of sales contests might not be needed; status-seeking in and by itself might motivate salespeople to work harder as long as they attain status from gaining a specific position in a sales contest (hence called status-only reward). In this paper we investigate the effect of both a financial/status and a status reward promise during a team-level sales contest. Contests can be considered as specific situations that affect team-based performance (De Matteo, Eby, & Sundstrom, 1998); yet, studies that explore the effects of different rewards during a contest at the team level (team contest) are scarce. In cooperation with the top management of a retail chain, the authors of this paper organized a large-scale field experiment to investigate this issue. As store managers display different leadership styles, we also studied how the leadership style of the store managers affected the incentives – store sales growth relationship, with the focus specifi- cally on transformational and transactional leadership styles. Hypotheses were tested in the 102 retailing shops participating in this natural field experiment covering a total of 35 weeks, using weekly objective sales data.