Although sales control has been identified by previous literature as an effective tool to promote salesperson commitment, unclear categorization of the focal variables makes existing findings confounding. This paper aims to provide more nuanced understanding about the relation between sales control systems and salesperson commitment by categorizing sales control into outcome control, activity control, and capability control. Moreover, we explore the moderating role of behavioral uncertainty, which includes sales cycle uncertainty and behavioral content uncertainty. Using a sample of 208 salespersons in China, we find the following results: (1) sales cycle uncertainty weakens the positive impact of outcome control on salesperson commitment and the negative relationship between activity control and salesperson commitment; (2) behavioral content uncertainty strengthens the positive link between outcome control and salesperson commitment and the negative impact of activity control on salesperson commitment; and (3) both sales cycle uncertainty and behavioral content uncertainty strengthen the positive relationship between capability control and salesperson commitment. This research enriches knowledge about sales control systems and offers insights into the important contextual role of behavior uncertainty that has been largely ignored by prior research in the sales force control literature.

Practitioners and researchers have shown great interest in information-technology (IT)-enabled interactions across partnering firms and developed instruments for measuring it. However, those instruments might have been under criticism as they were developed before the widespread adoption of the new IT applications like video conferences, DingTalk and WeChat Moments among Chinese managers for the last five years. The purpose of this study is to validate the instrument of IT-enabled formal and informal interactions for the contemporary Chinese context. First, the study reviews the literature on IT-enabled interfirm interactions and designs an open questionnaire through in-depth interviews. Answers from 85 pairs of suppliers and manufacturers are coded and the preliminary item pool is generated through the qualitative analysis. Next, a small-scale pretest with 120 manufacturing firms is conducted to purify and modify the item pool. Finally, a large-scale analysis with 336 manufacturing firms is conducted to check the reliability and validity of the measurements. The finalized scale yields six items measuring IT-enabled formal interaction and five items measuring IT-enabled informal interaction, among which six are newly derived in this study. The validated instrument reveals satisfactory reliability and validity and can serve as the basic instruments for future research on IT-enabled interactions.

The importance of information-technology (IT)-enabled interactions in promoting interfirm trust has been documented in literature. However, the currently available findings are limited because the role of IT-enabled informal interactions has been overlooked and the categorization of trust is unclear. To obtain detailed knowledge about the relation between IT-enabled interactions and trust, this study categorizes not only the IT-enabled interactions into formal and informal types but also trust into goodwill and competence trust. Moreover, this study explores the moderating role of relationship duration on the aforementioned relationships. Through a survey of 240 firms in China, this study made the following observations: (1) IT-enabled formal and informal interactions can promote both competence and goodwill trust; (2) compared with IT-enabled informal interactions, IT-enabled formal interactions promote competence trust, and a comparable extent of goodwill trust; (3) relationship duration strengthens the positive link between IT-enabled formal interactions and competence trust; however, it has no moderating impact on the link between IT-enabled formal interactions and goodwill trust; (4) relationship duration weakens the impact of IT-enabled informal interactions on goodwill trust; however, it has no significant moderating role on the relation between IT-enabled informal interactions and competence trust. Overall, this study enriches the knowledge regarding the relationship between IT-enabled interactions and interfirm trust.