The impact of salesperson’s ambidexterity and career stage: a quantitative study

To meet the growing challenges of today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, organizations are trying to focus on highly critical and value adding types of sales and experimenting with new paradigms, to improve the effectiveness of the B2B sales force (Sharma and Sheth, 2010; Cuevas 2018). As changes in the context are challenging existing sales force models, organizations are looking for new ways to optimally manage their resources and achieve multiple goals (Yu et al. 2013; Rapp et al. 2017; Sleep et al. 2020). The research in recent years has highlighted various ways of optimizing resources in salesforce management and suggested various ways of focusing on objectives and incentives at the salesperson level. In recent years, the paradigm of Sales Ambidexterity has emerged, as the effort to pursue apparently irreconcilable results and objectives, which even seems to increase sales performance (Yu et al., 2013; Vieira et al., 2019). The Sales Ambidexterity domain has been researched and developed at individual level aside the salesperson’s personal orientations literature, which represent a rich and relevant research domain, as the boundary spanning role of the salesperson makes it relevant to consider their orientations and psychologic disposition towards work and personal goals. In fact, extant research has investigated for decades the various nuances of the individual orientations of the salesperson, linking them to the company vision but also on an individual level to the outcome variables (Saxe and Weitz 1982; Sujan et al. 1994; Kohli et al. 1998; Harris et al. 2005). Another relevant aspect on the sales literature related to the individual salesperson orientations is the one on the personal disposition and attitude across the salesperson’s career (Pappas and Flaherty 2006; Khusainova et al. 2018), since it is known to have an impact on the salesperson's performance and job satisfaction. In particular for boundary spanning roles such as sales, personal orientations and goals are not only relevant in an instant perspective: the combinations of attitudes, orientations, aspirations and priorities in career evolution, was observed and developed by the Career Stage framework (Cron et al., 1988). The various career stages have been used to understand the salespeople evolution and progress in their careers as their attitudes and behaviors change (Flaherty and Pappas 2002), also trying to describe the relation with performance, commitment, and turnover intentions, better than age and job tenure. This work intends to deepen an aspect of great interest in the BtoB literature of recent years: the salesperson’s ambidexterity. Starting from the definition of Sales Ambidexterity as the ability to pursue multiple goals simultaneously, as customer acquisition and retention, or hunting and farming (De Carlo and Lam 2016), we propose to observe this salesperson's orientation and behavior across the salesperson’s career. Assuming that the personal evolution and life cycle has an important effect on the aspirations, priorities and effectiveness of sales professionals, we propose the Career stage (Cron 1988) perspective as a pivotal dimension to assess the changes in the personal disposition of the salesperson and the impact on sales outcomes and job satisfaction.