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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb008175. When citing the article, please cite: William L. Cron, John W. Slocum, Jr., (1986), “CAREER-STAGES APPROACH TO MANAGING THE SALES FORCE”, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 3 Iss: 4, pp. 11 - 20.

There is growing awareness that careers grow and change in a variety of ways during a person's work life. One change is in people's concerns and goals for their careers. This article discusses how people's career concerns will change over their working lives. The results indicate that the career goals of salespeople have a significant relationship to job attitudes and behavior. Management implications for recruiting and selection, motivating individual salespeople, and strategic sales force analysis are discussed.

The relationship between functional participation and several measures of channel member financial performance are evaluated. Channel theory suggests that greater participation in channel functions should be positively associated with channel member compensation. Support for the theory was found for gross margins and total operating expenses. However, return on assets were not found to be positively related to channel function participation.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

In the past decade or so, workplace organisation and restructuring processes, have been subjected to the most intense scrutiny. Driven by rapidly intensifying competitive pressures, work organisations sought increased flexibility, especially from labour, as they struggled to maintain market shares in an economic environment increasingly characterised by excess in labour supply. Pressures for change were probably most evident in the public sector where economic and ideological forces combined to limit the growth of government services and increase their exposure to competitive forces.

Considers how research carried out during trade shows can help industrial firms to manage the new product development process. Discusses the NPD process and offers a scheme for classifying trade fairs, thus making the selection of appropriate events easier for the industrial marketer. Develops recommendations for the conducting of new product research at trade shows and concludes that while not a substitute for traditional NPD research methods due to cost limitations and the different types of attendees present at various events, good opportunities exist for industrial exhibitors to use NPD stages such as idea generation, screening and testing at trade shows rather than concentrating on the commercialization of new products.

Describes the findings of a study into sales approaches taken by car dealerships during the slump of the Philippine economy. Covers 287 respondents across 29 dealerships of Japanese manufacturers. Provides rationale for some of the actions taken such as expansion and new models. Suggests that the study opens a new area of possibly more sophisticated research on the Filipino car‐buying pattern with the focus on the buyer, not techniques employed.

Accounting for stock options is a controversial issue. The FASB recognized that the “intrinsic value” method, which had been used for years, failed to adequately account for the costs involved. To rectify the problem they suggested the use of a “fair value” method. Their proposal met with strong objections from companies, which were concerned with the impact of the proposed standard on their reported profits. Consequently, the board relented and allowed the use of either method. Unfortunately, both the intrinsic value and fair value approaches have deficiencies, particularly in regard to how they measure compensation expense and gains and losses over time. This paper addresses these shortcomings by developing two alternative cost measurement approaches that apply an option‐pricing model on an iterative basis over the life of the option. Both approaches represent specific ways to implement exercise‐date measurement techniques for stock options. The paper argues that both approaches provide more relevant and reliable measures of an option’s cost than either intrinsic or fair value methods.

To examine the influence of company‐imposed reward systems on the motivation levels of salespeople.

Data were collected from 214 business‐to‐business salespeople. In order to assure the adequacy of the survey instrument, several salespeople were recruited to “pretest” the questionnaire. To test the potential moderating influence of career stage on pay mix and valence, expectancy, and instrumentality estimates, a split‐group analysis was performed. To test the moderating hypotheses for risk, we used two‐step regression models in which the dependent measures (i.e. valence, expectancy, and instrumentality) were first regressed on the predictor variables as main effects, and then regressed on the multiplicative interaction term along with the main effects.

Support was found for many of the hypotheses. In particular, individual‐level variables such as career stage and risk preferences moderate the relationship between pay mix and valence for the reward, expectancy perceptions, and instrumentality perceptions.

Managers must acknowledge that certain salespeople respond positively to fixed salary plans while others respond positively to incentive. In the past, managers might have relied on the salesperson to select the appropriate job for them. Salespeople are not “weeding” themselves out during the recruitment process. As a result, greater importance must be placed on human resource and sales managers during the time of recruitment.

There already exists a robust stream of literature on person‐organization fit that suggests that employees prefer to work for companies that are compatible with their personalities. There is an increasing amount of work in multi‐level research that suggests bridging the macro (organizational) and micro (individual) perspectives will enable researchers to make linkages between research streams that are commonly viewed as unconnected.

Because of the dramatic increase in health care costs and the fact that more people are retiring earlier and living longer, the issue of post retirement benefit costs other than pensions has become a topic of great interest to issuers and users of financial statements.The Financial Accounting Standards Board is in the process of requiring corporations to report these expected future post retirement costs as liabilities. This paper examines the proposed treatment of post retirement benefits costs and discusses alternative strategies a company may adopt to prepare for implementation of the standard.