Cross-National Comparisons of Sales Force Control Systems: A Proposal For an Integrative Perspective

Since Anderson and Oliver’s (1987) work has been published, a growing number of researchers are studying sales force control systems and their consequences on various aspects of a salesperson’s attitude, cognitions, behavior and performance (e.g., Cravens et al. 1993; Babakus et al. 1996; Challagalla et al. 1996; Oliver and Anderson 1994, 1995; Stathakopoulos 1996). According to their conceptual framework, sales management has to decide on the nature of salespeople supervision, evaluation and reward depending on a philosophy based on the control of behavior or outcome. According to them, a behavior-based sales force control is a strategy involving considerable monitoring and managerial direction, as well as subjective evaluation methods and high levels of fixed compensation. An outcome-based system, on the other hand, entails little supervision, straightforward evaluation methods and high levels of incentives. In essence, the first system shows salespeople how to perform, assuming that the adopted procedures will allow them to reach the desired objectives. The second system is mostly focused on salespeople results, and pays little attention to the way their performance is achieved. Contrary to Anderson and Oliver’s (1987) original predictions however, recent empirical evidence (Oliver and Anderson 1995) tends to show that sales management choice of a control system is not positioned on a continuum which end points would be outcome or behavior control. It would rather appear that the control system is non linear. Indeed, besides pure forms of outcome or behavior control systems, a hybrid type of control -including elements of both outcome- and behavior-based systems- seems to represent a significant share of governance modes (see Table 1). As additional empirical results appear to be rather scarce, it is interesting to note that, to the best of our knowledge, no other study has ever investigated salespeople management systems outside of North America.