| The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the propensity of salespersons to share market intelligence internally within their firm. Market intelligence refers to information pertaining to a broad set of market actors such as customers, competitors, and suppliers.;First, this study builds on insights from prior literature and a set of interviews with sales practitioners to develop a theoretical model of salesperson market intelligence dissemination. A central premise of the model is that, organizations are multi-level systems, i.e. phenomena in organizations occur across various levels of aggregation and often exert cross-level influences on one another. Accordingly, market intelligence dissemination is viewed as a result of both contextual and individual influences. Organizational factors hypothesized to exert a top-down influence are: feedback-contingent rewards, training orientation, sales-IT integration, formalized communication, sales-marketing conflict, management emphasis on open communication. Individual factors that are controlled for are: intelligence generation, organizational commitment, time pressure, and tenure.;Second, the study provides an empirical test of the proposed model. Data are collected using two Internet-based surveys; organizational and individual responses are provided by sales managers (72) and sales reps (232) respectively. The data are analyzed using a multilevel modeling technique (hierarchical linear modeling).;Consistent with the multi-level premise, the study finds that there is significant variation across organizations in the extents to which their salespeople disseminate market intelligence. Dissemination propensity is highest when the recipient is the salesperson's supervisor; it falls off significantly as the recipient context moves to peers within the sales unit, and further to peers from other departments. At the individual level, the extent of intelligence generation has a strong positive impact; organizational commitment has a marginal impact; time pressure and job tenure have little impact. At the organizational level, surprisingly the study finds little impact of the proposed contextual factors. In other words, while it is established that organizations vary significantly in the extent to which their salespeople share market intelligence, it could not be clearly determined why. The study speculates that certain sample-size-related and sample-design-related problems impede the detection of significant relationships rather than the proposed relationships being absent in the relevant population. |
