Understanding cross-cultural sales manager–salesperson relationships in the Asia-Pacific Rim region: a grounded theory approach

Abstract

As more organizations implement multinational strategies, sales managers leading sales forces encounter complex cultural challenges that affect relationships, processes, and outcomes. We undertake a qualitative study with the objective of understanding the sales manager–salesperson relationship when the sales manager is leading sales representatives located in other cultures. Because of the significant size and growth of Asian countries, we focus our study on the Asia-Pacific Rim region. In-depth interviews conducted with 21 sales managers working for a large multinational technology firm in our focal region provide the data for our analysis. Using a grounded theory approach, we identify five key themes: building and sustaining cross-cultural relationships, cross-cultural communication effectiveness, acquisition and maintenance of trust across cultures, language, and decision-making. From our findings, research propositions are offered and implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.     

A qualitative study of leader behaviors perceived to enable salesperson performance

Abstract

This study builds on and extends previous sales leadership research by exploring sales professionals’ perceptions of effective leadership behaviors. Semistructured interviews with both sales leaders and salespeople working in a global enterprise software company were examined through a qualitative analysis. Results indicated that participants believed sales leadership played an important role in influencing sales performance. When asked to describe specific sales leader behaviors that best enable salesperson performance, sales professionals – both sales leaders and salespeople – overwhelmingly referenced coaching, followed by collaborating, championing, and customer engaging. We define and describe these four key sales leader behaviors and identify four potential mediating variables (trust, confidence, optimism, and resilience), from which emerges a conceptual framework of sales leader behaviors perceived to enable salesperson performance. We examine these four key sales leader behaviors and mediators in the broader context of leadership theory, particularly transformational, servant, authentic, and adaptive leadership theories. The key contribution of this study is the identification of a set of leader behaviors that are likely to be especially effective in modern sales organizations given that they originated from the perceptions of sales professionals themselves.     

THE GOLEM LEGEND AND THE ENIGMA OF FACEBOOK

We are easily misguided as to the true nature of Facebook, and tend to treat it simply as a powerful technological instrument in the service of human intentions. We can, however, gain a better picture of it through recourse to the Jewish tradition of the golem, an image of human beings, created by them in a re-enactment of their own creation by God. It turns into a magic servant in modernity with an inherent dynamic running between its human and its subhuman characteristics. This dynamic is the main cause behind its becoming uncontrollable. In like manner, what is subhuman in Facebook serves its masters and functions under their total control, but also empowers Facebook's increasingly human operation, an algorithm-based capability which raises growing doubts about what counts as human. Facebook implies the crisis of humanity which coincides with the “death of God,” that is, the obsolescence of the idea of a divine creator.     

Religion and the Human Rights Idea

Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and its historical relationship with religion. It then turns to Little's book, next to the collection of essays edited by Twiss, Simion, and Petersen, which is described internally as a Festschrift for Little, and then to Hogan's book, and in the final section it explores comparisons among the books.     

ON "HUXLEYS EVOLUTION AND ETHICS IN SOCIOBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE" BY GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

Abstract. I concur with Williams that improving human ethics requires full consideration of the biogenetic facts; but I argue that the understanding of biogenetic facts, and of ethics also, can be improved by a fuller view of nature's mechanism for selecting what is fit, a view recently generated by physical scientists. For me ethics necessarily must fit the evolved genotype, but ethics does not emerge until the rise of cultural evolution, where nature selects a culturetype symbiotic with the genotype. I outline my integrated dynamics of the relation of culturetypes to genotypes and to the laws governing physical systems. The biologist's finding that a living organism is of transient significance compared with its lines of heritage and their consequences, I argue, is constructively important for ethical and theological understanding.     

Reciprocal peer management: Improving staff instruction in a vocational training program

To test the feasibility and utility of involving peers as sources of feedback, 6 subjects, instructors in a vocational program for adults with mental retardation, participated in a staff training and management program. Subjects' teaching interactions were assessed during baseline, in-service training (on effective teaching), return-to-baseline, peer management, and follow-up phases. Peer management was introduced in multiple baseline fashion across pairs of subjects. Members of each pair were trained to monitor peer teaching, to record and graph data, to provide feedback, and to set goals with the peer. Each pair then performed these procedures on the job for several weeks, during which time 4 of the 6 subjects increased their use of effective teaching methods (over baseline). However, inconsistencies in the magnitude and durability of these increases require that the study be viewed as inconclusive, although it has heuristic value as a promising model for involving co-workers in staff management programs.     

Three intensive community-based programs for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families

Systems of care for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families have generally lacked intensive community-based programs. We describe three types of newly established community-based programs in New York State and present a general evaluation plan for determining which programs work for various children and their families. The three community-based programs are Intensive Case Management, Family-Based Treatment, and Family-Centered Intensive Case Management. Process and outcome evaluations are being conducted for each of these programs. These evaluations make use of common intake and termination instruments, based on a minimum data set, standardized assessment instruments, and a common logic model, thus facilitating the comparison of findings across evaluations.     

Comparing the effects of two correction procedures on human acquisition of sequential behavior patterns

Thirty-one college undergraduates learned to touch abstract stimuli on a computer screen in arbitrarily designated “correct” sequential orders. Four sets of seven stimuli were used; the stimuli were arrayed horizontally on the screen in random sequences. A correct response (i.e., touching first the stimulus designated as first) resulted in that stimulus appearing near the top of the screen in its correct sequential position (left to right), and remaining there until the end of the trial. Incorrect responses (i.e., touching a stimulus out of sequence) terminated the trial. New trials displayed either the same sequence as the one on which an error had occurred (same-order correction procedure), or a new random sequence (new-order correction procedure). Whenever all responses occurred in the correct sequence, the next trial displayed a new random sequence. Each phase ended when five consecutive correct response sequences occurred. Initially, the same-order correction procedure increased control by the position as well as by the shape of the stimuli; also, it produced more errors, more total trials, more trials to mastery, and more individual patterns of reacquisition than were produced by the new-order procedure.     

Experimental analysis of individual differences and personality

In psychological studies individual differences that result in variability in data and thus mask the effects under investigation have been reduced or eliminated in two ways: (1) through the use of large numbers of subjects and statistical manipulations, or (2) through extensive and controlled studies of individual subjects. The latter, behavior-analytic, method is scientifically better because it permits identification of the variables that result in individual differences. This paper advocates the direct study of individual differences and personality rather than indirect study through experimental control procedures. Some data are presented showing that individual differences in response patterns have orderly characteristics. Extension of the experimental analysis of behavior to the study of individual differences and personality is likely to be important both scientifically and for the future growth of behavior analysis.