Incentives and job redesign: the case of the personal selling function

Abstract

Changes in the internal and the external environment of organizations are causing many of them to redesign individual jobs as team functions. Sales organizations, in particular, are responding to increased selling costs by redesigning the selling function to include a support person. The basic idea here is to let the support person perform important but relatively low-skilled tasks, such as lead generation, so that the salesperson's valuable time is freed up to perform important and relatively high-skilled tasks, such as product promotion. However, this trend gives rise to several interesting questions. Specifically, we ask: How are the incentives offered to the salesperson affected by the introduction of the support person? To what extent will the support person be utilized? And, how will the job be conducted under the new design? We find that the level of incentives and job redesign are related, albeit in a complex manner. We also find that the firm will not always fully utilize the support person, nor will the salesperson always fully delegate the low-skilled task to him. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.