Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Modern Research in Management, Economics and Accounting
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Benefit of Improvisational Behavior of Salespeople in a VUCA Environment and How Formalization Influences Its Impact?
Peerayuth Charoensukmongkol
ABSTRACT:
For sales organizations, salespeople tend to play the important role in determining the business success. However, the market environment nowadays that is highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) has created tremendous challenge for salespeople to achieve high sales target. Thus, salespeople must possess some competence then enables them to perform well under the VUCA environment. In particular, research has shown that one personal characteristic that makes individuals to deal effectively with novel situations is improvisational behavior. Basically, improvisational behavior is known as the spontaneous action in response to unanticipated or unplanned occurrences. Given the benefit of improvisational behavior that has not been extensively proven in the sales context, the objective of this research is to investigate whether improvisational behavior could be the personal characteristic that determines the level of performance that salespeople achieve. Moreover, this research explores the role of the workplace factor in terms of formalization that may constrain the benefit that salespeople obtain from improvisational behavior. Survey data were collected from 197 salespeople in Thailand. The results obtained from Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling support the positive effect of improvisational behavior on sales performance. However, the moderating effect result indicates that the positive effect of improvisational behavior is weaken among salespeople working in a highly formalized workplace. Overall, this research provides managerial implications for sales organizations regarding the interventions that could be implemented to help their salespeople to perform well in the VUCA business environment.
keywords: competencies, organizational structure, sales effectiveness, sales management, sales performance