Personal Selling and Sales Management
Firms wish for sales representatives to employ social media technologies in connecting with relational associates, including clients, supplier, and other workers. Consequently, firms endeavor to employ business students who are competent with various types of social media (Levin, Hansen, and Laverie 380). This is mostly in the area of marketing reason being, students are conversant with technology and blogs that works well in obtaining large customer base. This article extends the study on motivation by differentiating between three types of motivation, which are intrinsic, extrinsic, and apathetic. The study also explores the possible moderating effects of willingness on intention-to-use to real use and past performance on use to intended result. Data is collected from voluntary and involuntary respondents, and examined by means of partial least squares (PLS) regression. The results are that apathetic motivation emerges independent of the other two types of motivation. Incorporating apathetic motivation enhances the illuminating power of motivation and expands the understanding of the moderating power of willingness.
The respondents in the quasi-experimental design are 194 business students whereby 52% are female. The students are enrolled in either an undergraduate marketing course or consumer behavior classes for a semester at a large campus in Texas. Behavioral use, which shows the specific function of using the blog, is being considered as a continuous variable by counting the number of postings each member made during the semester (Levin, Hansen, and Laverie 382). Given that the idea of this research was to concurrently test numerous conceived causal relationships between the constructs, the data is being scrutinized using PLS regression. PLS is preferable in approximation of a path-dependent representation when the suppositions about predictability do not hold.
The focus of this study integrates the apathetic motivation and the moderating impacts of willingness on reason to use and of past performance on use to aimed outcome. The outcomes have numerous repercussions for sales supervisors and investigators. First, sales supervisors should reflect on sales representatives’ extent of apathetic motivation together with their levels of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations toward application social media. Corporations are asking workers to involve themselves in social media, which could appear as invading their private life relationships, leading to sluggishness as revealed by higher levels of apathetic motivation (Levin, Hansen, and Laverie 384). Sales representatives with high level of apathetic inspiration, sales supervisors could overcome this problem by engaging the representatives in social media skills. Consecutively, these sales representatives’ high level of apathetic inspiration could decrease as they realize that their indifference is baseless. Therefore, as revealed in this article, moving to an involuntary background could have a major influence on the connection relating behavioral aim toward behavioral exploitation of social media. Second, if sales supervisors need new recruits to use sales related technologies, then they ought to reflect on changing their staffing process. Through changing the interviewing procedure, sales supervisors endeavor to discover potential workers who are indifferent about sales as an activity or applying technologies associated with sales (Levin, Hansen, and Laverie 385).
Third, researchers ought to discover a more extensive conceptualization of apathetic inspiration. It may possibly be that apathetic motivation emerges not out of a lack of extrinsic or intrinsic motivation, but out of where the individual supposes he or she cannot attain the set goal. This conceptualization may possibly clarify why or how people with higher extents of extrinsic and intrinsic inspiration toward a specific task decline, or else remain uninvolved in, the activity (Levin, Hansen, and Laverie 386). Finally, a potential drawback is using business students as respondents. The firms being approached are unwilling to have workers take part in a research that had both intentional and unintentional conditions.
Works cited
Levin, Michael A., Jared M. Hansen, and Debra A. Laverie. “Toward UndersTanding new sales employees’ parTicipaTion in markeTing-relaTed Technology: moTivaTion, volUnTariness, and pasT performance.” Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management 32.3 (2012): 379-386.