A Salesforce Control Theory Analysis of Enterprise Microblog Posts

Abstract

Social computing and enterprise 2.0 trends are reshaping business. Selling is no different. In this work, we examine the theory of behavior-based and outcome-based salesforce control put forth several decades ago in the context of social business. We collect enterprise microblog posts of salespeople and conduct a preliminary empirical study. Our preliminary results indicate that microblog posts written by sellers not on commission are greater in number and more cooperative on average, confirming the propositions of salesforce control theory. However, a different view of the empirical results indicates that there may not be a difference between commission and noncommission sellers in the content of their posts, warranting further study.