Critical Examination of Salesforce Commitment and Job Involvement as Contributors to Organizational Performance

In this era of customer-orientation and cost savings, the organizational (psychological) climate faced by salespeople in a firm is an area of investigation that can enhance sales performance. This study contributes to the literature by reconsidering the strategic importance of the effect of salesforce commitment and job involvement on organizational performance. Firstly, our model posits the direct and interactive (or perhaps complementary) role of commitment and involvement on organizational performance. More specifically, we are interested in the contingency role of commitment on the performance impact of involvement. Secondly, we question whether all levels of salesforce commitment benefit the organization. Commitment theorists argue that high levels of commitment may result in costs to the organization that exceed its benefits (Gallagher and McLean Parks 2001). This “dark side” of commitment, to the best of our knowledge, has not been tested. We propose direct and moderating relationships between both affective commitment and job involvement versus organizational performance. The direct relationships of affective commitment and job involvement will enhance organizational performance through their positive effects on the value of knowledge-based resources. The moderating relationship of affective commitment and job involvement interacts in a way that, under varying degrees of affective commitment, the relationship between job involvement and organizational performance is likely to vary. Further, we question whether the nature of the relationship between affective commitment and organizational performance is always linear. Using an organizational-level approach, the authors test the proposed model and its hypotheses using a sample of 102 Canadian sales organizations.