Managing Differential Effects of Salespersons’ Regulatory Foci – A Dual Process Model of Dominant and Supplemental Pathways

Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-021-00821-y

Regulatory focus theory helps us understand the relationship between individuals’ motivational orientation and how they accomplish goals. According to the theory, a person might be mainly driven by one of two distinct self-regulatory orientations: a promotion focus or a prevention focus.

In this study, the researchers examine how sales organizations can leverage their employees’ promotion- or prevention-oriented regulatory focus to improve performance.

Promotion focused individuals are concerned with gains, such as professional advancement and accomplishment. Prevention focused individuals emphasize safety and meeting responsibilities; they avoid losses, typically by following established rules and guidelines. By recognizing whether individual employees are promotion or prevention focused, sales firms might have several pathways to putting them in better positions to succeed.

Existing sales research has employed regulatory focus theory extensively. And empirical evidence suggests that salespeople in situations they perceive as fitting with their own regulatory focus can demonstrate heightened motivation and perform better than their peers.

Multiple factors influence salespeople’s perception of whether a required professional behavior fits with their own regulatory focus.

But the existing literature has failed to consider managerial actions that can

1. motivate salespeople to perform even when they believe their environment does not fit with their own regulatory focus,
2. reinforce perceived fit, or
3. inadvertently disrupt perceived fit.

So, what actions can motivate salespeople to perform when their environment may not fit with their regulatory focus? The authors of this study attempt to answer the question in both practical and theoretical terms. The practical approach is designed to identify the appropriate managerial actions that can help real-world businesses enhance performance given perceived fit or lack of it; from the theoretical perspective, elucidating underlying mechanisms and their complex interactions with relevant environmental characteristics can enrich the insights offered through regulatory focus theory.

Prior research, while generally confirming salespeople are most effective when their regulatory focus aligns with their environment, fails to address the role of secondary work-related behaviors that may not fit with an employee’s regulatory orientation. For example, modern salespeople must not only meet sales targets, but they must also build high-quality and sustainable customer relationships by providing superior customer service. However, most extant research ignores the possibility that customer service provision may not always render a strong fit with some salespeople’s regulatory orientation.

This study’s authors identify two alternate behaviors, adaptive selling and service behaviors, to serve as proxies for the promotion and prevention foci. Adaptive selling involves altering sales behaviors during customer interactions based on newly gathered information. Service behaviors are those required to nurture customer relationships. In the context of this study, the researchers make adaptive selling a proxy for a promotion focus because of its strategic inclination to maximize “hits” and minimize errors of omission despite higher uncertainties in performance outcomes. Service behaviors serve as a proxy for the prevention-focused salespeople, who seek to avoid customer defection by growing customer satisfaction and establishing trust.

Because adaptive selling and service behaviors are both fundamental building blocks for a variety of relational selling strategies critical to success, the researchers investigate the differential mediation effects of the two alternate behaviors in their theoretical framework. They then use a dataset from 391 salespeople, 50 sales managers, and their firms’ archival performance records to consider empirical evidence in support of the framework.

The researchers find that a competitive psychological climate can strengthen salespeople’s perception of fit between a promotion-oriented regulatory focus and adaptive selling. Managers can further reinforce the fit by deploying outcome, rather than behavioral, control over the employees. The researchers find the opposite pattern for salespeople identifying with a prevention-oriented regulatory focus. For personnel inclined to avoid losses, a highly competitive climate does not facilitate perceived fit with service behaviors, and managers must motivate the individuals to perform services through behavioral control, as outcome control exacerbates the lack of fit.

The researchers’ findings therefore provide guidance for what managers should do to

1. motivate their salespeople to perform even when their environment is not conducive to perceived fit with their regulatory focus,
2. strengthen existing fit, and
3. avoid disrupting perceived fit.

Moreover, the study contributes to the literature by elucidating an underlying dual process mechanism through which salespeople’s regulatory foci operate. According to the researchers, a dominant pathway represents perception of fit with salespeople’s main job responsibilities, while fit with alternative job responsibilities represents a supplemental pathway. By showing ways managers can manipulate the pathways to build on one another, the researchers help correct existing theoretical ambiguities.