Content area
Full text
An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.
Introduction
Salesperson organizational commitment and its antecedents have received considerable attention due to the importance that sales managers place on retaining sales personnel ([26] Johnston et al. , 1990; [31] Mathieu et al. , 2000). In the current economic environment, well-trained salespeople, knowledgeable about their customers and industries represent a valuable resource for business-to-business firms. Yet due to the current economic environment, these individuals may not be as committed to their employer as were salespeople in earlier times. The issue of organizational commitment takes on increased importance due to its link with propensity to leave and turnover ([9] Brown and Peterson, 1993).
While there have been many proposed antecedents to organizational commitment, job satisfaction has, perhaps, received more attention than other precursors of salesperson organizational commitment (e.g. [3] Babakus et al. , 1999). Consistently, across studies, job satisfaction has shown a strong positive relationship with organizational commitment in the sales force ([9] Brown and Peterson, 1993). Previous sales-related research examining the job satisfaction [arrow right] organizational commitment relationship has typically used a global construct to measure job satisfaction (i.e. [27] Johnston et al. , 1987). There is substantial evidence, however, that job satisfaction is a multi-faceted construct ([11] Churchill et al. , 1974; [14] Comer et al. , 1989; [28] Lagace et al. , 1993). Thus, while we know a great deal about the relationship between global job satisfaction and organizational commitment, questions remain as to the relationship between various facets of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Some evidence from sales research indicates that various facets of job satisfaction may exhibit different relationships with other constructs when compared to a single measure of global job satisfaction ([8] Boles et al. , 2003). There are significant managerial and theoretical implications from finding different relationships between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Since the 1970s, numerous researchers have investigated gender differences in job attitudes of sales personnel ([48] Siguaw and Honeycutt, 1995). The results from the earlier research findings have been both supportive and non supportive ([47] Schul and Wren, 1992; [48] Siguaw and Honeycutt Jr, 1995; [38] Moncrief et al. , 2000) of gender differences in job attitudes -...