The article provides information on a study which investigated network and environmental linkages between manufacturers and dealers. A discussion is presented about the concept of power and depende...

The present study of 295 trade salesmen in three organisations reports on the relationship between organisational shape or structure (tall, medium, and flat) to job satisfaction, anxiety-stress, and performance. The findings indicate that salesmen in flat organisations (1) perceive more satisfaction with respect to self-actualisation, and autonomy, (2) perceive lower amounts of anxiety-stress, and (3) perform more efficiently than salesmen in medium and tall organsiations.

The influence of attitudinal similarities on the dyadic interaction of salesmen and their prospects was examined with particular attention to the unsold prospect. Unsold prospects differed significantly from salesmen and sold prospects on all variables, and perceived role congruence was found to be the major discriminator of unsold prospects.

ALTHOUGH marketing is defined in terms of services as well as products, marketers generally have concentrated their attention on products, with the assumption that services are marketed using the same guidelines. In most areas, this assumption has proved essentially true; in the area of marketing channels, however, it is not only incorrect but its application has limited our understanding of the marketing of services. This article seeks to broaden this understanding by evaluating marketing channels for services as a separate decision area from those for products.

"Social Character and Consumer Innovativeness." The Journal of Social Psychology, 100(1), pp. 153–154

O NE of the major causes of job tension is a lack of role clarity; that is, either the nonexistence of information needed to do his job effectively, or the lack of adequate information, leaves the worker with an ambiguous perception of his role.1 It has been shown that a lack of role clarity increases the probability that a person will be dissatisfied with his job, will experience psychological stress (job tension), will seek opportunities for improving clarity and satisfaction, will be less innovative, and will generally show a lack of job interest.2 While different groups within the same organization may experience different amounts of role clarity, there appear to be several factors associated with the sales position that make it more susceptible to a lack of role clarity than other positions in the firm. First, the salesman must often perform with inadequate or nonexistent information. This can occur in his relationships with customers as well as with his company. In many instances he lacks clear-cut knowledge of his customers' needs or has little indication of whether or not they are interested in his proposals, whether their potential business is worth his time and effort, or what the probability of making a sale is. Within the company, the salesman often is not provided with adequate information concerning his performance. This lack of performance feedback has long been a bone of contention between salesmen and their managers .3 Second, most salesmen occupy a boundary position-one that requires much crossing of boundaries between departments within organizations. Such positions are very likely to exhibit a lack of role clarity.4 The salesman's boundary position in relation to his customers is obvious. However, he is also frequently required to coordinate his activities with other departments within his own firm (e.g., production). Often information necessary to achieve this coordination is not provided, and conflict results between different functional areas of the firm.5 Finally, the salesman's occupation might be called semi-innovative. Most salesmen are required to develop new business, and much of their workday is relatively unstructured. Innovative roles are very susceptible to a lack of role clarity. This is because innovative personnel are often expected to seek a change in the status quo which other elements of the firm are attempting to maintain, and the information to perform this role effectively is usually nonexistent.6 Despite the fact that the selling role is highly conducive to a lack of role clarity in most firms, the sales occupation has seldom been the subject of research that focused on role clarity and emotional reactions to it. In the study.reported here, the authors sought to empirically test the question of role clarity as perceived by sales force members, both in terms of its effect on several job-related factors and its importance for salesmen as compared with another group in the organization. The results reveal that greater role clarity may lead to better job performance.

Role clarity and the need for role clarity are investigated empirically as interpreted by a total of 261 salesmen, supervisors, and operating employees in a medium-size electronic manufacturing pla...

Although numerous demographic and behavioral characteristics have been associated with early triers, little research has been done examining the relationship between early trial and product attributes. This study suggests that the degree of newness of a product is a major factor in determining who tries it.

Maslow's need-hierarchy theory of motivation has had a major influence on the thinking and research of many writers studying managerial behavior in an organizational setting. A growing number of groups of managers have been used as subjects in studies concerned with motivation and perceived need satisfactions. One conspicously absent group in recent studies conducted by behavioral scientists has been management scientists, a randomly selected sample of 192 of whom participated in the present study. The objective of the study was to learn about (1) the relation between job level and perceived need satisfaction, (2) the relation between company size and perceived need satisfaction, and (3) the interaction effects of level and size on perceived need satisfaction. Since the management science profession is becoming a significant force in society and organizations, the preliminary findings of this study provide some much needed motivational data. It was generally found that the most predominant independent variable studied was the level of the management scientist in the organization. Hopefully, more controlled and sophisticated research studies will be stimulated by the present study.

This article describes how U.S. international advertising managers view cultural differences and how they relate to approaches to international advertising.

It is reasonable to predict that after a purchase a buyer would be highly receptive to advertising and sales promotion put out on the product he bought. Literature put out by the manufacturer presents favorable aspects of the product and can reassure the buyer that a wise purchase decision has been made. This hypothesis has been tentatively supported in two studies which found that automobile buyers exhibited high readership of advertisements for the make of car they had recently purchased [3, 4]. Unlike these other studies which sought to measure the purchaser's seeking of favorable information about his chosen alternative after making a major buying decision, this study sought to measure the impact of such information, specifically, the effect of post-purchase reinforcement on back-out behavior of automobile purchasers. This behavior occurs when the purchase has been made but the product has not yet been delivered, and the loss (if any) to the buyer if he should back out amounts to his deposit.' Thus, under controlled conditions where one group of purchasers receives favorable post-decision information and another group receives none, the difference in back-out rates between the two groups can be used as a measure of the effect of positive reinforcement.

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

It has been almost twenty years since David Riesman published his famous work on the social character of people [8]. In brief, Riesman's theory is that individuals can be grouped into three types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, or A person who is tradition-directed guides himself by membership in a particular clan or caste. Riesman believes that there are few, if any, such individuals in America today. Instead, he conceives the social character of the majority of the people in the United States as falling somewhere along a continuum from innerto other-directed.