Drivers and outcomes of salespersons’ value opportunity recognition competence in solution selling

Abstract

In B2B markets, firms seek to provide customer solutions instead of merely selling goods or services. As boundary-spanners, salespeople are pivotal for implementing this strategic shift. Yet, extant literature provides limited insights into salesperson’s resources and competencies required for customer solutions, particularly in the early phases of solution selling. This research focuses on salesperson’s value opportunity recognition competence (VOR), which is a central requirement for salespeople to be able to navigate the early phases of solution selling. Analyzing large-scale, multi-level data of 799 salespeople and their respective sales managers in 29 sales organizations, the authors investigate the role of different salesperson resources and work environment characteristics for strengthening their VOR. The authors find that salespeople need both customer and technical knowledge, but customer knowledge is more important. Salespeople also can substitute individual technical knowledge with strong internal relations, but strong customer relations are no substitute for individual knowledge about customers’ business models and processes. Formalization turned out to be a double-edged sword in the context of VOR development, while transformational leadership has positive effects only. The findings bear concrete implications for improving the selection, training, and work environment of solution salespeople.     

Do Co-Worker Conflicts Enhance Daily Worries about Job Insecurity: A Diary Study

The long-term negative consequences of job insecurity on employees’ health and well-being have been demonstrated by several studies, but there is very little evidence on the daily experience of job insecurity and on the factors that may influence it. Therefore, we investigated whether short-term changes occur in the experience of job insecurity and whether these are influenced by daily co-worker conflicts. We carried out a diary study, in which 66 employees answered a questionnaire over the course of five working days. We conducted a multilevel analysis in which we included co-worker conflicts as a predictor, and type of contract, emotional stability, and aggregated job insecurity perceptions as control variables. Our results revealed that job insecurity varies on a daily level, and that 23 per cent of the variance could be explained at a within-person level. Co-worker conflicts were a significant positive predictor for perceived job insecurity in subsequent days after controlling for aggregated job insecurity perceptions at person level. Reversed causation was not found. Practical implications for organisations should focus on the promotion of positive social relations in the work environment in order to mitigate or avoid the negative consequences of social stressors in uncertain times.     

Stimulus and response anticipation in a serial reaction task

When subjects are confronted with sequences of stimuli that are constructed according to certain rules, they tend to improve their performance in terms of lower error rates and/or faster reaction times as compared to random sequences of the same stimuli, even if they are not able to report the regularities of events.     

Georg Klaus über Kybernetik und Information

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

在创造的零点

文章主要探讨了西方艺术创造观的当代转型问题。首先回顾和批判了现代时期盛行的将艺术视为上帝创世的再现与复写的绝对创造观点。随后，从宇宙进化的立场出发，提出了新型的艺术创造理念。其核心意义在于：艺术家的职责，不是以造物主的身份提出所谓的绝对创造宣言，而应以谦卑的态度，将作品视为内在于进化过程本身的东西，由此在艺术与进化特征之间建立特殊的关联。通过上述思考，文章揭示了东西方艺术观念在当代背景下的融合趋势。