The role of formal information sharing in key account team effectiveness: does informal control matter and when

Team selling is a useful approach for retaining strategically important accounts in business-to-business markets. For key account sales teams, ensuring adequate access to information about customer needs offers sustainable competitive advantages. However, the internal alignment of market information remains a recurring managerial issue in key account team selling. This study develops a moderated mediation model to identify management strategies that encourage team members' formal information sharing, which in turn improves team effectiveness. Analysis of a multilevel data set comprising 37 fluid key account teams reveals that customer orientation and task interdependence increase formal information sharing among team members. Managers' exercise of professional control strengthens the positive impact that formal information sharing has on team satisfaction. However, the practice has a dysfunctional influence on the positive effect of task interdependence on formal information sharing. Firms with key account management (KAM) programs must decide whether the marginal benefits attained by advocating such professional control outweigh the possible drawbacks.     

Moral Conviction and Political Engagement

The 2004 presidential election led to considerable discussion about whether moral values motivated people to vote, and if so, whether it led to a conservative electoral advantage. The results of two studies—one conducted in the context of the 2000 presidential election, the other in the context of the 2004 presidential election—indicated that stronger moral convictions associated with candidates themselves and attitudes on issues of the day uniquely predicted self-reported voting behavior and intentions to vote even when controlling for a host of alternative explanations (e.g., attitude strength, strength of party identification). In addition, we found strong support for the hypothesis that moral convictions equally motivated political engagement for those on the political right and left and little support for the notion that a combination of morality and politics is something more characteristic of the political right than it is of the political left.     

Organizational justice and extrarole customer service: The mediating role of well-being at work

The purpose of this article is to propose and test a model of extrarole customer service (ERCS). We propose that organizational justice (distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational) promotes well-being at work (low burnout and high engagement). Well-being at work, in turn, engenders more effective ERCS. Thus, well-being at work is considered a mediator of the relationships from organizational justice to ERCS. This fully mediated model was compared to an alternative fully direct model. The sample consisted of 317 contact employees who were working in the Spanish service sector. The results of structural equation modelling supported the importance of the mediating role of the positive side of well-being at work (engagement) in the relationship between organizational justice and ERCS. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications.     

Religion and Civic Engagement in Muslim Countries

Previous studies of religion on civic and political participation focus primarily on Western Christian societies. Studies of Muslim societies concentrate on Islamic religiosity's effect on attitudes toward democracy, not on how Muslim religious participation carries over into social and political arenas. This article examines the relationship between religion and civic engagement in nine Muslim‐majority countries using data from the World Values Surveys. I find that active participation in Muslim organizations is associated with greater civic engagement, while religious service attendance is not. In a subset of countries, daily prayer is associated with less civic engagement. The main area in which Muslim societies differ from Western ones is in the lack of association between civic engagement, trust, and tolerance. Religious participation is a more significant predictor of secular engagement than commonly used “social capital” measures, suggesting a need to adapt measures of religiosity to account for differences in religious expression across non‐Christian faiths.     

Effects of deprivation on engagement in preferred activities by persons with developmental disabilities

This study examined the effects of deprivation on engagement in activities for 3 adult men with developmental disabilities. First, an assessment was conducted to identify a high- and a low-preference activity for each participant. Second, the high-preference activity was made available following three amounts of deprivation of the activity (15 min, 2 hr, and 1 to 4 days); the low-preference activity was made available following the schedule of deprivation that produced the highest level of engagement by each participant in the high-preference activity. The results were that 1 to 4 days of deprivation produced the highest average amounts of engagement in the high-preference activity for each participant; this amount of deprivation did not produce high engagement in the low-preference activities. Third, the deprivation procedures and results were replicated when high-preference activities were presented by teachers during the participants' daily activities when their engagement had been quite low.