Jay Mulki

Northeastern University | NEU · MARKETING

Purpose Tolerance to ambiguity (TOLA) is a personal trait influencing one’s comfort and proficiency in navigating uncertain situations. While the concept of role ambiguity is well-established in sales literature, the broader trait of ambiguity has been largely overlooked in this context. In the dynamic landscape of modern business, uncertainty is a...

Participative leadership has become the norm where the leader acts as a coach to set clear directions and orchestrates company resources and actively seeks salespeople’s suggestions and ideas in his/her decision-making process. However, this supporting style can become ineffective when the sales manager seeks the collective wisdom of his/her salesp...

Researchers prescribe that the combined influence of personal characteristics and work conditions should be examined to provide a clearer understanding of performance at work. Here we explore the combined impact of ethical climate and salespeople’s external WLOC on job meaningfulness. This study suggests that when salespeople perceive that their sa...

The American Marketing Association (AMA) Faculty Consortium: New Horizons in Selling and Sales Management (“New Horizons”) emphasized the historical foundation and evolution of the field and fulfilled the event’s traditional role of defining a future research agenda. Selling and sales management has witnessed dramatic changes since the last New Hor...

Sales and customer service employees often face demanding or even abusive customers. This study utilized structural equation modeling to develop a preliminary model identifying relationships between interpersonal customer conflict, key consequences of such conflict, and potential means to avoid or reduce that conflict. Results confirm that interper...

It is human nature that personal interactions are often charged with emotions and laden with conflicts. Workplace encounters are not immune from this reality. Despite this, few studies have examined ways to reduce interpersonal conflict in the workplace. This study examines the interpersonal impact of emotion regulation on salesperson relationships...

Despite contemporary shifts in sales organizations toward more collaborative work, the sales profession tends to comprise many individuals with a psychological preference to work alone, known as "lone Wolf tendencies" (LWT). For this reason, theory about LWT has been almost exclusively developed in the sales literature. The current literature has l...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of mentor beliefs about effort related to the knowledge and learning process on their extent of mentoring at work, and to determine the role that the mentor’s perception of psychological safety plays in tempering this relationship. Design/methodology/approach – This study was conducted at...

Careers in sales involve stress, which often translates to role stress that negatively impacts performance. To address this important issue, the present research examines an antecedent of stress, salespeople's regulation of emotions and the impact on organizational outcomes. Study findings show that salespeople's regulation of emotions is conducive...

Hiring competent salespeople and keeping salespeople motivated and engaged to enhance job performance is a major objective for sales managers. This study tests the relationship between employee–s self-efficacy, perfectionism, work engagement and job performance. In addition, given the entry of millennial (also called GenMe or Generation Y) to the w...

There is general recognition among practitioners and academics about the importance of emotional intelligence in improving individual and team performance. In this conceptual manuscript, we propose a model whereby a team member’s emotional intelligence (EI) is an antecedent of an individual’s creativity in new product development (NPD). This study...

The importance of providing tailored solutions to customers, i.e. being solution oriented, is now recognized across organizational settings such as business-to-business, business-to-consumer, private and public sector contexts.

This research explores how salespeople make decisions and what factors influence these decisions. Research in psychology suggests that, in making decisions, people use both intuition and deliberation, often relying on some degree of both processes. This study examines the impact of emotion, intuition, and deliberation on a salesperson's adaptabilit...

As multinational organizations increase operations in emerging economies, firms need to understand how cultural values prevailing in a host country can influence leadership practices developed and practiced in Western economies. This study explores the relationships among leadership styles and salespeople's attitudes and behaviours with data from s...

Workplace isolation has been recognized as a critical issue facing salespeople in field offices. Studies have recognized that field salespeople are physically and psychologically isolated, but there is little empirical research on the effects of perceived isolation on important job outcomes. One important issue that has yet to be considered is the...

This research examines a model focused on two acute workplace stressors—interpersonal conflict and work overload—and their interrelationships with role stress, emotional exhaustion, job attitude, working smart, job performance, and turnover intentions. The moderating role of working smart on the relationship between work overload and interpersonal...

As boundary spanners, salespeople experience stressful situations on a regular basis. Prolonged exposure to stress is known to lead to burnout. This research focuses on two neglected dimensions of burnout, namely, depersonalization and personal nonaccomplishment, specifically as they relate to salespeople. A sample of 221 French salespeople is used...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate why salespeople resist change and the impact of resistance to change on customer responsiveness and performance outcomes. Design/methodology/approach Survey responses derived from 233 salespeople from three large financial institutions in Mexico are used to test relationships involving salesperso...

In current turbulent times, organisations have to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions in order to attract and retain clients. According to our quantitative study in which we compared clients' expectations and perceptions, the key to a successful adaptation in complex sales contexts lies in increasing salespeople's levels of expertise, as it...

Sales leadership research has typically taken a leader-focused approach, investigating key questions from a top-down perspective. Yet, considerable research outside sales has advocated a view of leadership which takes into account the fact that employees look beyond a single designated individual for leadership. In particular, the social networks o...

Job stress is an integral part of the organizational landscape and particularly severe in the sales profession. A host of studies have looked at felt stress, its antecedents, and consequences. This research examines how employee resistance to change and a manager's decisiveness affect the salesperson's felt stress and turnover intentions. This stud...

Purpose This research seeks to explore the role played by ethical reputation in amplifying the positive impact of value received by the customer on satisfaction with the supplier and ultimately loyalty. Design/methodology/approach Survey responses derived from 299 customers, concerning two large financial institutions within Chile, are used to tes...

Virtual work is becoming the norm in sales organizations because it is cost effective for the firm and can benefit customers and salespeople. However, along with these benefits, virtual work brings new challenges to organizations. One critical issue is workplace isolation (WI). This study uses responses from a sample of 346 salespeoples in the phar...

Teams represent a dominant approach to getting work done in a business environment. Creativity enables teams to solve problems and leverage opportunities through the integration of divergent thoughts and perspectives. Prior research indicates that a collaborative culture, which affects how team members interact and work together, is a critical ante...

Customer orientation (CO) and the development of long-term relationships with customers are known conditions for growth and profit sustainability. Businesses use special treatments, inducements, and personal gestures to show their appreciation to customers. However, there are concerns about whether these inducements really create the right percepti...

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This study combines meta-analysis with structural equation modeling to examine the impact of service quality (SQ) on customer satisfaction (CS), attitudinal loyalty (AL), and purchase intention (PI). Findings from 86 articles containing 115 independent samples and 161 effect sizes representing 42,877 customers are used to test a model of the relati...

Few research studies have published specific empirical data regarding the reverse logistics practices of companies. This multi-stage study employed interviews, site visits, and a mail survey to collect responses from 230 members of the Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC) regarding their reverse logistics practices. Results suggest tha...

A consensus notion in sales research is that superior performance requires high levels of effort. Studying the effect of individual and situational factors on effort has significant implications for managers and academics. This study shows that supportive leadership leads to higher salesperson effort directly and through a mediating process that in...

As the lines blur between when work ends and home life begins, employees, working longer hours and multitasking, increasingly report feeling overwhelmed by their work. This research note investigates the effect of work overload and self-effcacy on important job outcomes—capability rewards and pay satisfaction. Utilizing social cognitive theory, the...

Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for ethical climate in organizations. In recent years, there has been an increased skepticism about the role played by corporate executives in developing and implementing ethics in business practices. Sales and marketing practices of businesses, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, have come...

Attitudinal- and stress theory are used to investigate the effect of ethical climate on job outcomes. Responses from 208 service employees who work for a country health department were used to test a structural model that examines the process through which ethical climate (EC) affects turnover intention (TI). This study shows that the EC–TI relatio...

This study develops and tests a model that examines the relationships among lone wolf tendencies, task performance, contextual performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions with a sample of 331 pharmaceutical salespeople. Results reveal that lone wolf tendencies lead to a lower contextual performance as represented by the dimensions of hel...

Purpose The purpose is to investigate, the difference between SERVQUAL and SERVPERF's predictive validity of service quality. Design/methodology/approach Data from 17 studies containing 42 effect sizes of the relationships between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF with overall service quality (OSQ) are meta‐analyzed. Findings Overall, SERVQUAL and SERVPERF ar...

Purpose In the years since Saxe and Weitz developed a scale to measure the selling orientation and customer orientation (SOCO) of a salesperson, research findings on the effect of SOCO on salesperson job performance have shown mixed results. This article aims to synthesize the findings from the empirical studies to identify the direction and the st...

Virtual offices are a growing trend in today's work environment and are expected to influence marketing roles dramatically, especially selling. These conditions may lead to perceptions of isolation, both socially and organizationally. Workplace isolation is a twodimensional construct that represents individuals' perceptions of isolation from others...

This study builds on previous research to investigate the integrated effects of ethical climate and supervisory trust on salesperson’s job attitudes and intentions to quit. Responses from 344 salespeople who work for a global pharmaceutical company were used to examine the relationships among ethical climate, trust in supervisor, job satisfaction,...

This study builds on previous research to investigate the effects of ethical climate on salesperson’s role stress, job attitudes, turnover intention, and job performance. Responses from 138 salespeople who work for a large retailer selling high-end consumer durables at 68 stores in 16 states were used to examine the process through which ethical cl...

Emotional exhaustion and organizational deviance are getting increased attention because of their negative impact on business in terms of lost productivity, decreased job satisfaction, lower organizational commitment, and decreased performance. In this study, we investigated the combined effect of leadership style and person–job fit on emotional ex...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to build on previous research on stress in sales forces to investigate the effect of perceptions of time wasted on salespersons' attitudes and behavioral intentions. Design/methodology/approach Responses from 400 salespeople who work in 49 business units of four Ecuadorian financial institutions were used to te...

This article presents a meta-analysis that includes studies conducted over the past 25 years across 14 countries and a mix of selling and nonselling situations. Findings indicate that the relationship between organizational commitment and job performance is positive and stronger for sales employees than for nonsales employees. Stronger correlations...

This study used meta-analysis to investigate the relationship between leadership style and job performance in sales settings. Specifically, the research investigates whether transformational or transactional leadership is more appropriate in creating a high performing sales environment. Results indicate that transformational leadership is positivel...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-115). Includes vita.