Antecedents of conflict in marketing's cross-functional relationship with sales
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of the factors that explain thelevel of interpersonal conflict between marketing managers and sales managers. The paper aims toestablish the overall level of interpersonal conflict in the full sample and in the two sampled countries(UK and Australia).Design/methodology/approach - The study draws on two theoretical frameworks to develop themodel, namely structural contingency theory and the interaction approach. More specifically, theconceptual framework uses three groups of variables to explain interpersonal conflict: structural,individual, and communication. Importantly, the study developed and tested nine hypotheses.Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the measures while OLS regression wasused in testing the hypotheses. The data were collected from 200 sales managers in the UK andAustralia.Findings - Overall, the study finds that there was a surprisingly low level of interpersonal conflictbetween marketing managers and sales managers and that there were no differences across the twocountries. Of the three groups of variables, the two communication variables - frequency andbidirectionality - had the strongest effects on interpersonal conflict. The next strongest effects werefrom the individual, level variables - psychological distance and the sales manager's formal education.The findings also reveal that the level of the sales manager's marketing training and the marketingmanager's sales experience had no influence on interpersonal conflict. Two of the three structuralvariables use of lateral linkages and being part of a corporation had the hypothesized negativeimpact on interpersonal conflict.Originality/value - This is the first study to use a large empirical survey to examine the marketingand sales dyad. Also, it is one of the few studies to test the effects of communication behviours on peermanager conflict.
Year of publication: |
2006
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Authors: | Massey Graham ; Dawes Philip |
Publisher: |
Emerald Group Publishing |
Saved in:
freely available
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