Mark W. Johnston

• Doctor of Business Administration - Texas A&M University
• Professor at Rollins College

Sales ethics have been investigated from both an individual and an organizational perspective. The sales force and sales managers often operate as boundary spanners in an external environment, putting them in a very visible role for ethical behavior. Propositions and a framework to understand the sales ethics subculture supports a research agenda....

Examined the relationships between role conflict, role ambiguity, work–family conflict, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction and propensity to leave, in a sales environment. Results of surveys completed by 104 salespeople employed by a regional media firm indicated that: 1) role conflict was significantly related to emotional exhaustion; 2) work–...

The role organizational commitment plays in salesperson behavior is unresearched. To increase understanding of both causes and outcomes of organizational commitment for salespeople, this study proposed and tested a path model. The model was drawn from the framework for studying organizational commitment proposed by Chornco (1986).

Data were collected from the national field sales force of a major consumer goods manufacturer. The study develops a structural model of salespeople's perceptions of their supervisors' behaviors (i.e., leadership consideration and leadership role clarity), and the influence of supervisors' behaviors on the sales force's role perceptions, job anxiet...

Customer oriented selling, defined as practicing the marketing concept at the level of the individual salesperson and customer (Saxe and Weitz 1982), is important in selling situations yet has received relatively little attention from marketers. As such, job tenure, gender, organizational commitment, work involvement, and supervisory support are al...

Pre-MBA work experience is required for admission to many graduate schools of business. In the present study, MBA graduates with a wide range of pre-MBA work experience were surveyed to assess the economic value of such work experience. No evidence was found of a systematic financial advantage to students from working for several years before enrol...

This framework for personal selling and sales management ethical decision making is based on sales and marketing ethics research and grounded in ethical decision-making models in marketing. Using the two major streams of research - individual and organizational factors - a framework is developed that includes organizational culture, ethical issue i...

Demographic differences among consumer groups have become increasingly important to the development of marketing strategies. Marketers depend heavily on the sales force to implement strategies at the consumer level and, not surprisingly, different groups may view the salesperson’s role differently. Unfortunately, unethical sales practices targeted...

The authors take a scholarship of teaching perspective to examine the field of selling and sales management, an area of marketing that has received very little attention within the marketing education literature compared to other core topics in marketing. Research questions toward scholarship of teaching are developed around each of the following k...

The rapid increase of women in the sales world has brought about debates on the role of gender in contemporary sales organizations. The key question is whether gender differences, in and of themselves, create different attitudinal and behavioral relationships. A small but expanding stream of research and the expanded participation of women in many...

Emotional exhaustion is a potentially important construct in examining sales force behavior and attitude relationships. A conceptual model and hypotheses are developed to study the antecedents and consequences of the emotional exhaustion construct. The hypotheses are tested using LISREL 7 to analyze data from a sample of field salespeople from a la...

As productivity pressures, job uncertainties, changing sales strategies, and growing international competition increase, the salesperson experiences unprecedented levels of job stress. Cause and effect of job stress still remains poorly understood. Examines the role of a number of organizational variables including met expectations, role conflict,...

Sought to (1) develop a conceptual model of salesperson job satisfaction building on the S. P. Brown and R. A. Peterson (1993) model and examine the relationships in a different sales setting as called for by them, and (2) extend job satisfaction research by considering the effects of intrinsic motivation and organizational variables on the model....

Using a nested models approach, four models of the outcomes of role perception variables - the Bedeian and Armenakis (1981) model; the Schaubroeck, Cotton, and Jennings (1989) model; the Wunder, Dougherty, and Welsh (1982) model; and a proposed model - are compared. Results suggest that both fit indices and individual path significance tests are re...

The current status and future of marketing education has been discussed widely in the popular and academic literature in recent years. Unfortunately, though many groups have offered their opinions, very few empirical studies have reported the actual perceptions and opinions of marketing academicians and doctoral students. This study reports the res...

The state of marketing education has been discussed a great deal in the discipline. Unfortunately, very few empirical studies have examined the actual perceptions of marketing academicians. To better understand these perceptions, a study was conducted that examined the interaction of individual differences in marketing faculty and instructional sty...

Employee movement out of the organization has been examined extensively, but unfortunately, research on employee movement inside the organization is less pervasive. The study reported here uses a longitudinal quasi-experimental design to investigate the relationships of a selected set of work-related attitudes to promotion and turnover in a sample...

Employee movement out of the organization has been examined extensively, but unfortunately, research on employee movement inside the organization is less pervasive. The study reported here uses a longitudinal quasi-experimental design to investigate the relationships of a selected set of work-related attitudes to promotion and turnover in a sample...

Employee movement out of organizations has been examined extensively, but, research on movement inside the organization, is less profusive. This study uses a longitudinal quasi-experiment to investigate the relationships of work-related attitudes to promotion and turnover of 157 salespeople. Results show a complex interaction between key job relate...

This study employs a pretest-posttest experimental design to extend recent research pertaining to the effects of teaching business ethics material. Results on a variety of perceptual and attitudinal measures are compared across three groups of students — one which discussed the ethicality of brief business situations (the business scenario discussi...

The theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein 1980) and two versions of theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1985) are compared in terms of their ability to predict intentions and behavior. Two behaviors are examined: one involves a high degree of volitional control (voting), and the other is goal-directed; i.e., it involves a low degree of voliti...

The importance of salesperson evaluation in the sales organization is widely recognized. Unfortunately, little research has investigated the perceptual process of sales managers in their evaluation of salespeople. As a result, this study examines the relationship between managers perceptions of salespeople's effort and ability to perform and the ty...

The purpose of this experiential exercise is to introduce students to some of the benefits and limitations of perceptual mapping using multidimensional scaling procedures. Specifically, the exercise demonstrates how MDS: (1) aids in understanding the relative perceptual positioning of brands (or other stimuli) for individuals and/or segments of con...

To examine the antecedents and consequences of the development of salespeople's organizational commitment during early employment, the authors conducted a longitudinal study. The study focused on how changes in three key antecedents (leadership behavior, role stress, and job satisfaction) influence the development of commitment and how changes in c...

To examine the antecedents and consequences of the development of salespeople's organizational commitment during early employment, the authors conducted a longitudinal study. The study focused on how changes in three key antecedents (leadership behavior, role stress, and job satisfaction) influence the development of commitment and how changes in c...

In this study a confirmatory methodology was implemented to analyze a model that uses the J. R. Rizzo et al (see record 1971-01407-001) scales of role conflict (RC) and role ambiguity (RA; i.e., the A. G. Bedeian and A. A. Armenakis [see PA, Vol 66:4547] model). The validity of the RC and RA scales were examined through structural equations analys...

The process used by a new marketing Ph.D. in selecting the first academic post is an area of great interest given the current academic job market. The present study was designed to identify the criteria which new Ph.D.s use in selecting their first academic position. Among the results of the study was the identification of three distinct orientatio...

Salesforce research has traditionally viewed turnover as intrinsically bad for the organization. However, recent research on turnover suggests that this approach is overly pessimistic in its treatment of the turnover problem. A conceptual framework (turnover functionality) is presented that considers both the positive as well as negative effects of...

The salesforce of a national consumer goods manufacturer was used to conduct two distinct tests of the model of salesperson role perceptions and work-related attitudes developed by Fry, ET AL. (1986). In addition, the model was extended by examining the moderating role of job tenure. Results of the study support, in general, the results of Fry et a...

The present study replicates a salesperson-turnover study reported by Futrell and Parasuraman [28] by examining the strength of the relationship of five dimensions of job satisfaction to propensity to leave for high- and low-performing groups of salespeople. Current knowledge about salesperson behavior is extended by testing the hypothesis that pro...