Salespeople Contribution to Innovation in the Firm: Can Generativity Be a Driving Force?
Résumé
This paper explores the role of salespeople’s concern for the well-being of future
generations—a phenomenon known as generativity—in driving otherwise busy salesmen
and women to take part in their employer’s innovation process through idea generation,
promotion, and realization (that is, their innovative performance). In addition, it explores
whether or not said innovative performance translates into increased sales performance for
salespeople. Six hypotheses are derived from the extent literature and are empirically
tested with a sample of 145 professional salespeople. After controlling for other important
variables, such as self-efficacy and expertise, our results confirm the positive influence of
generativity on two dimensions of innovative performance—idea promotion and idea
realization (although only marginally for the latter)—but not on idea generation. In turn,
the influence of salespeople’ innovative performance on their individual sales performance
is mitigated: Only idea promotion turns out to be a marginally significant predictor of sales
performance. These results are discussed in light of the apparent conflict of self-efficacy
with our hypothesized generativity—innovative performance—sales performance chain.
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