Lucy M. Matthews (DBA Student) , Joseph F. Hair, Jr. (Committee Chair) , and Alex R. Zablah (Committee Member)
Why Empowering Salespeople Is a Double-Edged Sword Ongoing Research
Frontline sales and service employees in business-to-business markets are often empowered to manage a firm’s relationship with its customers. In many cases, empowerment facilitates autonomy to determine, for example, the level of effort directed toward specific customers or whether to even pursue a prospective customer account. The objective of empowerment for salespeople is to hold them accountable for customer results, and its use has generally shown positive results such as improved job satisfaction. Unfortunately, potentially undesirable effects have not been studied. For example, salespeople are sometimes asked to terminate a customer or downgrade their status, and nothing is known about the potential negative outcomes of such a task. This study conducted quantitative and qualitative interviews that focused on this issue and learned that empowerment may have positive as well as unintended negative effects. The findings indicate that improved management of empowerment, particularly increased engagement (amount of energy and effort exerted), reduces burnout and ultimately salesperson turnover. Specifically, our study found that improved supervisor support increases engagement while at the same time reducing burnout, and that the most helpful approach is to quickly provide feedback to salespeople. This study focused on salespeople but in recent years other types of employees have been empowered and more research is needed to determine whether similar findings apply to other types of employees.
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