Examining the Drivers and Consequences of Salesperson Evasive Hiding: An Abstract

Abstract

Salespeople often face the dilemma of having to protect their personally acquired market knowledge from others in their organization, while also seeming to be a team player. In order to not being perceived as being opportunistic by their colleagues, salespeople have the option of: (1) sharing their information, or (2) neglecting to divulge their knowledge, possibly being perceived as uncooperative, or (3) appearing to share information while in actuality obscuring substantive knowledge, which we call evasive hiding. As a way to protect their knowledge, evasive hiding occurs when salespeople intentionally appear to be openly sharing sales knowledge when they are actually deliberately avoiding the need to provide any useful information to others (Connelly et al. 2012). Research has shown that individuals evasively hide knowledge due to interpersonal and situational factors (Connelly et al. 2014). Yet, knowledge hiding can have serious consequences for performance (Černe et al. 2014; Peng 2013), as salespeople may not consider this to be so detrimental. We surmise that knowledge is a critical source of competitive advantage for individual salespeople, especially when you consider that research has shown a positive relationship between salesperson knowledge and performance (e.g., Mariadoss et al. 2014). To further exacerbate this, firms tend to foster situations where salespeople have to compete with one another in order to enhance sales force productivity, resulting in the unintentional side effect where salespeople end up viewing their colleagues as internal rivals in competition for limited organizational rewards like public recognition, promotion, and financial compensation (Anaza and Nowlin 2017). Therefore, salespeople may act to defend their source (e.g., knowledge) of competitive advantage much like any organization would. Leveraging social exchange theory, we investigate the relational antecedents and customer-directed outcomes of evasive hiding as well as the conditional effects of pushover manager and environmental dynamism. The empirical findings reveal that the antecedents’ effect on evasive hiding are conditional upon the managerially-actionable construct of pushover manager. Evasive hiding was subsequently found to have a negative impact on customer-directed outcomes, particularly at low levels of environmental dynamism.