Impact of Relational Incongruity on Customer Ownership and Sales Outcome Performance: A Resource-Advantage Theory Approach (open access)

Impact of Relational Incongruity on Customer Ownership and Sales Outcome Performance: A Resource-Advantage Theory Approach

There exists heightened research attention afforded to the pivotal demands - both internal and external - that exist within the salesperson role set. Unprecedented pressures on salespersons to acquire, retain, and build enduring customer relationships to enhance the firm's bottom-line performance coincides with increasing complexities within the work environment. This relevant and timely research introduces an original construct derived from the long-standing attention afforded to relationship selling, relational incongruity that exists within the buyer-seller exchange. Relational incongruity, defined, is the relational tension spawned between the salesperson, the customer, and the firm when situational psychological incongruity exists within the buyer-seller exchange itself. Framed in resource-advantage theory, this research investigates divergent demands and the increasing complexity of sales relationships through the lens of relational incongruity. A research program based on minimizing relational incongruity will augment the sales management and B2B literature by looking at how he salesperson and the customer build strong relationships as well as the antecedents that can undermine these relationships by generating realtional incongruity.
Date: December 2017
Creator: Fergurson, Ricky
System: The UNT Digital Library