Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Among the tools at the disposal of sales management are management controls to influence sales force attitudes, behaviors and performance. Although formal controls have received substantial attention over the years, informal controls have mostly have gone unnoticed or are rarely viewed as control devices particularly by sales management researchers. In addition, knowledge is strikingly limited of mediating mechanisms explaining how informal controls, particularly sub-cultural control, intrinsically motivates sales force to engage in creative endeavors to be successful despite frequent calls for research beyond individualistic cultural context of developed countries. Using complementary insights from management control theory and intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, we confirm empirically our proposed model that optimistic sub-cultural control engages sales force in intrinsically motivated creative behaviors which consequently drives their superior sales performance in collectivist cultural context of Pakistan.