Leveraging social supports to cope with sales complexities and facilitate value-based selling in the cross-functional sales team contexts: JD-R perspective

Abstract

In today's dynamic industrial market, adoption of a value-based selling (VBS) has emerged as a crucial approach, which forces companies to establish cross-functional sales teams. Yet how sales task and team complexities, as challenging/hindrance job demands, require team social supports, as job resources, to buffer against them in implementing VBS, remains an under-researched topic. Based on job demands-resources (JD-R) model, we investigate how sales task and sales team complexities moderate the link between social supports and VBS. Findings reveal that, as challenge job demands, demand ambiguity and task non-routineness positively moderate the instrumental/emotional support–VBS link and the instrumental support–VBS link, respectively. Whereas, as hindrance job demands, team instability negatively moderates the instrumental/emotional support-VBS link, and role ambiguity negatively moderates the instrumental support-VBS link. Additionally, team heterogeneity positively moderates the instrumental support-VBS link while negatively moderates the emotional support-VBS link. The study considers the roles of social supports (job resources) in shaping team VBS behavior under different sales complexities (job demands), not only contributing to the VBS literature by extending the research context to B2B cross-functional sales teams, also providing a insights on how to implement VBS and enhance performance via social supports in various sales situational complexities.