Company profitability depends on an active and engaged sales force; thus, managers continue to seek best practices for motivating salespeople to perform productively. This issue remains critical as salespeople typically have significant discretion in their work and serve as the face of the company to customers. Thus, I seek to develop a greater understanding of motivational forces to contribute to both personal selling theory and sales force management. The first essay of my dissertation is a meta-analysis, which synthesizes studies published between 1985 and 2019 on salesperson motivation to answer the following key questions: how are intrinsic and extrinsic motivation related to salesperson performance? In my second essay, I examine antecedents and outcomes of intrinsic motivation. In addition to the antecedents found in Self-Determination Theory, I explore the notion of sense of purpose and develop a scale for the construct, showing how it is distinct from related constructs in the literature. Using longitudinal, objective effort and performance measures provided by a large sales firm, findings reveal that intrinsic motivation is more positively associated with working hard, working smart, and salesperson performance than extrinsic motivation. In addition, the analyses demonstrate how sales managers' leadership styles can leverage both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for increased effort, adaptivity, and performance over time. Finally, in the third essay, I demonstrate how to motivate salesperson resilience. Findings indicate that intrinsically motivated salespeople are more resilient than extrinsically motivated salespeople, and resilience is associated with better performance through working harder and working smarter; however, certain managerial interventions are needed to activate the resilience within salespeople for increased effort.
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