Aditya K Gupta

Job crafting has been identified as an important mechanism through which employees can proactively reshape job demands and resources to enhance personal and work goals. This study examines how promotion-focused and prevention-focused job crafting influence meaningful work and ethical behaviors among salespeople. Results from two studies, a preliminary quasi-experiment and a survey of business-to-business salespeople, show that promotion-focused job crafting enhances meaningful work and ethical behaviors, whereas prevention-focused job crafting has the opposite effect and reduces meaningful work and ethical behaviors. Further, empowering leadership and organizational support strengthen the positive impact of promotion-focused job crafting on meaningful work, whereas empowering leadership weakens the negative impact of prevention-focused job crafting on meaningful work. Overall, these findings demonstrate that not all job crafting behaviors by salespeople yield beneficial outcomes and, specifically, organizational interventions play an important role in calibrating the countervailing effects of job crafting. Based on these findings, several theoretical and practical implications are identified.

To meet the shifting needs and preferences of the contemporary sales workforce, sales organizations are deploying idiosyncratic deals (I-deals), or mutually beneficial individualized workplace arrangements between salespeople and the organization. However, research is lacking on how, and under what conditions, I-deals facilitate work engagement and performance among salespeople. In this study, based on analysis of data gathered from 221 business-to-business salespeople, we demonstrate that I-deals are positively related to two foci of salesperson work engagement (i.e., social engagement and change engagement) and salesperson performance. Furthermore, we find that ethical self-leadership, which is driven by ethical leadership, functions as an internal self-governance mechanism that strengthens the impact of I-deals on salesperson work engagement. Based on these results, we delineate novel theoretical and practical implications on the role of I-deals in facilitating effective sales talent management.

To meet the shifting needs and preferences of the contemporary sales workforce, sales organizations are deploying idiosyncratic deals (I-deals), or mutually beneficial individualized workplace arrangements between salespeople and the organization. However, research is lacking on how, and under what conditions, I-deals facilitate work engagement and performance among salespeople. In this study, based on analysis of data gathered from 221 business-to-business salespeople, we demonstrate that I-deals are positively related to two foci of salesperson work engagement (i.e., social engagement and change engagement) and salesperson performance. Furthermore, we find that ethical self-leadership, which is driven by ethical leadership, functions as an internal self-governance mechanism that strengthens the impact of I-deals on salesperson work engagement. Based on these results, we delineate novel theoretical and practical implications on the role of I-deals in facilitating effective sales talent management.