Research About Relationship Among Salesperson's Ability, Salary Mechanism Preference And Team Cooperation Inclination

The incentive of sales force is a very important issue in marketing management. Without the practical activity of sales force, it is impossible to carry out the marketing strategy successfully. Being the most important part of sales force incentive system, compensation design has significant impact on the business competitive power. Compensation design, especially the design of salary structure and performance measures, is essential for marketing management and puzzles many marketing managers.According to the past research, there are three genres about the study of sales force compensation design. The first is from the incentive theory of economics, focusing on research about the impact of incentive mechanism. The second is from the theory of psychology and human resource management, such as competency model theory. The third is from field research by survey data. In general, there is a lack of research that integrates these three genres in sales force compensation design, especially in China.By integrating the research of economics incentive theory and competency model theory, this study focuses on the research about the relationship among salesperson's performance level, competency characteristics (mainly self-dependence characteristic), salary mechanism preference (including team goal setting, salary structure, restriction of salesman qualification) and team cooperation inclination. It provides theory evidence for the sales force compensation system design.As the results show, there is significant relationship among salesperson's performance level, competency characteristics (mainly self-dependence characteristic), salary mechanism preference (including team goal setting, salary structure, restriction of salesman qualification) and team cooperation inclination. Besides that, it is important to notice, the hypothesis deduced by economics incentive theory become insignificant when competency index is included in model. It is necessary to integrate the general results of economics theory with individual competency elements to design effective sales force compensation system.To some extent, this study fills a gap for the lack of the individual characteristics in economics study about the sales force compensation design and provides support for the generalization of competency model theory.