Helping Colleagues Sell New Products: Impacts of Team Diversity and Position within the Team
Speaker
Abstract
| In the modern era of team-based product selling, companies must foster intra-team helping behaviors by individual salespeople driven by individual goals. This study analyzes how team composition, in terms of diversity and members’ positions within the sales team, affect each salesperson’s prosocial attitudes and behaviors, as well as his or her new product selling performance. Using survey and time-lagged archival data from 211 salespeople in 32 sales teams, the authors find strong support for a combined impact of team diversity and individual position on willingness to help colleagues. Contrasting effects arise for team composition with regard to sales experience and expected demand: To benefit from experienced members, team diversity should be low, whereas to benefit from salespeople’s high expected demand for the new product, team diversity should be high. Finally, the findings reveal that team members who help peers most diminish the performance differences among team members and succeed better in selling new products than their less helpful counterparts. |
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| Contact information: |
| Dr K. Dittrich |
