Managing Customer and Organizational Complexity in Sales Organizations

Salespeople face increasingly complex work environments, both externally with customers and internally with various departments in their own organizations. Because managing such customer and organizational complexity is crucial to performance, the authors conceptualize and develop measures of customer and organizational complexity and examine the effects on salesperson outcomes. In line with job demands-resources theory, salespeople leverage personal and supervisory resources to manage complexity. The test of the conceptual model uses matched salespeople–sales manager data gathered from a large business-to-business firm. The empirical findings reveal that personal resources (sales self-efficacy) help manage complexity in general but create greater role stress in the face of customer complexity. The effectiveness of supervisory resources (transactional leadership behavior) is contingent on the type of complexity and the personal resources available to a salesperson. These results indicate not only how salespeople manage different complexities but also how sales managers should adapt their leadership behaviors to enhance salesperson performance.