Cognitive and Affective Determinants of Sales Force Performance: A Two-wave Study

In this paper, we expand upon Brown, Cron, and Slocum's (1997) model of salespeople and their goal-directed behavior. We specifically include anticipatory emotions, the desire the act, perceived behavioral control, and outcome expectancies. We also re-conceptualize the authors' singular notion of “stakes” into its financial and psychological components, and their representation of “volitions” into account planning and territory planning. We further show that salespeople's empathy regulates the effects of anticipated and anticipatory emotions on the desire to act. We tested our hypotheses using a two-wave study of 154 B2B salespeople from a European based pharmaceutical company.