Unleashing the mechanism among salesforce control system, salesforce ambidexterity, and emotional exhaustion to enhance the competitive advantage of organizations

Bilal Ahmad; Da Liu; Muhammad Irfan; José Álvarez-García

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.909656

Unleashing the mechanism among salesforce control system, salesforce ambidexterity, and emotional exhaustion to enhance the competitive advantage of organizations

Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 29:13:909656. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.909656. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Bilal Ahmad¹, Da Liu¹, Muhammad Irfan^{2

3

4}, José Álvarez-García⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Economics and Management, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China.
² School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
³ Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
⁴ Department of Business Administration, Ilma University, Karachi, Pakistan.
⁵ Departamento de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad, Instituto Universitario de Investigación para el Desarrollo Territorial Sostenible (INTERRA), Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain.

Abstract

The service-sales interaction should be aligned within and outside the organization, but many companies are not harvesting the benefits of this technique. In line with the conservation of resources (COR) theory, the current research investigates the impact of the salesforce control system on salesforce ambidexterity (service and sales interface), which eventually leads to emotional exhaustion service-related performance outcomes. We assess the proposed model using cross-sectional data of 321 Pakistani salespeople from B2B organizations and employ structural equation modeling for data analysis purposes. First, the study results show that behavior-based control has an inverse influence on salesforce ambidexterity. On the other hand, outcome-based control is positively associated with salesforce ambidexterity. In addition, salesforce ambidexterity is positively linked with emotional exhaustion. However, emotional exhaustion has a negative impact on both service innovation implementation and service recovery performance. Finally, the results demonstrate the significant and positive moderating influence of self-efficacy and customer demandingness between exogenous and endogenous constructs. The study is particularly important to B2B sales organizations struggling with the difficulties of salesforce ambidexterity and how they control their sales representatives.

Keywords: customer demandingness; emotional exhaustion; salesforce ambidexterity; salesforce control system; self-efficacy; service-related performance.