Intangible sales team resources: Investing in team social capital and transactive memory for market-driven behaviors, norms and performance

Complex offerings and evolving customer needs increase the demand for market-driven salespeople. Yet many of today's managers struggle to effectively deploy this selling approach. In light of this reality, we develop and test a multi-level market capabilities framework to examine team-level drivers and boundary conditions of market-driven salesperson behaviors, norms, and performance. Data collected in a lagged, multi-source, cross-level field study of 246 salespeople nested within 54 sales teams provide evidence that investments in team social capital (ITSC) support the self-correcting, customer-centric, learning behaviors needed for performance. Results show that managers' ITSC are positively associated with team goal monitoring, commitment to service quality, and learning effort. Further, goal monitoring and learning effort increase commitment to service quality, which helps drive sales performance. We also find that transactive memory systems (TMS) can be an efficient team knowledge resource that strengthens the learning effort-to-performance and service quality-to-performance relationships.