This study offers insight into the perceived leadership behaviour of sales managers in a pharmaceutical organisation in South Africa. The study specifically investigated the extent of the relationship between leadership behaviour of sales managers and motivation of sales teams during the implementation of strategic alliances. The study followed a mixed methods approach and had a correlational research design. The population in this study was the fifty four (54) sales representatives and their respective sales managers of the six sales teams identified, who are directly responsible for implementing strategic alliances. The population was demarcated into six (6) sales teams with each team reporting to a separate sales manager. Inferential and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The quantitative data were analysed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r). The qualitative component was analysed using a content analysis. The findings of the correlation analysis suggest that an overall positive and moderate relationship exist between autocratic leadership behaviour of sales managers and the motivation of sales teams. A similar relationship exists between team leadership and extrinsic motivation. A positive and weak relationship exists between directive and supportive leadership and motivation. Similarly, a positive and weak relationship exists between team leadership and intrinsic motivation. However, the extent to which these relationships exist varies between the sales teams. The findings of the content analysis indicate that task-oriented leadership behaviour may exert the strongest motivator for sales teams when implementing strategic alliances. / Business Management / M. Com. (Business Management)

This thesis consists of two central Parts. Part 1 examines the extent to which an agent s transaction-specific investments (TSIs) in a customer relationship increase his/her concerns for opportunism by his/her own co-workers. Thus, unlike prior research in marketing that examines opportunism by the recipient of TSIs, I show that agents become concerned with opportunism by non-recipients of TSIs. I then introduce novel moderators that shape the relationship between TSIs and concerns for internal opportunism. Importantly, I also show that in response to concerns for internal opportunism, agents will engage in internal safeguarding behaviors. Notably, unlike external safeguards between firms which tend to benefit firms (e.g., relational norms), I show that internal safeguarding has a deleterious effect on performance. I test the set of hypotheses with data collected from two sources: account managers and their supervisors. In Part 2, I advance the emerging view on customer solutions by simultaneously examining the networks within and between selling and buying teams involved in the development and deployment of complex customer solutions. Such a concurrent within-and-between perspective helps to bridge research on buying and selling teams, which prior research tends to examine only in isolation of each other. This research also extends the literature by showing how within-team network characteristics interact with between-team network characteristics to affect solution effectiveness. Notably, I advance the literature by moving beyond firm-level and individual-level dyads to team-level dyads and introduce a new network characteristic mirrored ties to help our understanding of the interactions between these dyads. I develop my hypotheses in the context of a sales team selling a complex customer solution to a buying team and test the hypotheses using an innovative, picture-based conjoint field experiment from 233 purchasing managers.

A mudança de comportamento dos consumidores através do advento da tecnologia e das redes sociais gera um grande empoderamento dos mesmos, alterando substancialmente a forma de relacionamento das empresas com seu público final. Atentas a este mercado, as empresas de mídia passam por profundas mudanças, tanto do ponto de vista da entrega de conteúdo ao seu público, quanto no seu formato administrativo, estratégico e financeiro. Sendo assim, a presente dissertação apresenta abordagens apoiadas em técnicas multivariadas para composição de equipes comerciais e de remuneração dos times de venda de uma empresa de comunicação. No artigo 1, objetiva-se gerar um modelo para estimar a premiação comercial das equipes de venda das rádios do Grupo RBS. Para tanto, inicialmente geram-se agrupamentos das emissoras de rádio do Grupo RBS no estado do Rio Grande do Sul e de Santa Catarina com base nos seus perfis de similaridades. Para cada cluster gerado, gera-se uma regressão linear múltipla da premiação comercial validado através de validação cruzada por intermédio do R2 ajustado e Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). O segundo artigo aborda a clusterização dos top clientes do Grupo RBS e o impacto na composição das equipes comerciais por meio do método da seleção de variáveis. As 7 variáveis originais foram avaliadas através do método de seleção de variáveis “Omita uma variável por vez”; o melhor Silhouette Index (SI) médio, métrica utilizada para avaliar a qualidade dos agrupamentos gerados, foi obtido quando 3 variáveis foram retidas. Os agrupamentos gerados por tais variáveis refletem o comportamento de compra de mídia dos clientes; os agrupamentos foram considerados satisfatórios quando avaliados por especialistas do Grupo RBS. / The change in the behavior of consumers with the advent of technology and social networks generates a great empowerment of themselves, substantially altering the relationship form of companies to their final audience. Attentive to this market, media companies undergo profound changes, both from the point of view of delivering content to their audience, as well as in their administrative, strategic and financial format. Thus, the present dissertation presents approaches supported by multivariate techniques for the composition of commercial and remuneration teams of the sales group of a communication company. In article 1, the objective is to generate a model to estimate the commercial awards of the sales teams of the RBS Group radios. To do this, we initially generate groupings of radio stations from the RBS Group in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina based on their profiles of similarities. For each cluster generated, a multiple linear regression of the commercial award is generated, validated through cross validation through the adjusted R2 and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The second article addresses the clustering of RBS Group top clients and the impact on the composition of business teams through the variable selection method. The original 7 variables were evaluated through the variable selection method "Omit one variable at a time"; the best Silhouette Index (SI) average, metric used to evaluate the quality of the generated clusters, was obtained when 3 variables were retained. Clusters generated by such variables reflect customers' buying behavior of media; the clusters were considered satisfactory when evaluated by RBS Group experts.

A mudança de comportamento dos consumidores através do advento da tecnologia e das redes sociais gera um grande empoderamento dos mesmos, alterando substancialmente a forma de relacionamento das empresas com seu público final. Atentas a este mercado, as empresas de mídia passam por profundas mudanças, tanto do ponto de vista da entrega de conteúdo ao seu público, quanto no seu formato administrativo, estratégico e financeiro. Sendo assim, a presente dissertação apresenta abordagens apoiadas em técnicas multivariadas para composição de equipes comerciais e de remuneração dos times de venda de uma empresa de comunicação. No artigo 1, objetiva-se gerar um modelo para estimar a premiação comercial das equipes de venda das rádios do Grupo RBS. Para tanto, inicialmente geram-se agrupamentos das emissoras de rádio do Grupo RBS no estado do Rio Grande do Sul e de Santa Catarina com base nos seus perfis de similaridades. Para cada cluster gerado, gera-se uma regressão linear múltipla da premiação comercial validado através de validação cruzada por intermédio do R2 ajustado e Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). O segundo artigo aborda a clusterização dos top clientes do Grupo RBS e o impacto na composição das equipes comerciais por meio do método da seleção de variáveis. As 7 variáveis originais foram avaliadas através do método de seleção de variáveis “Omita uma variável por vez”; o melhor Silhouette Index (SI) médio, métrica utilizada para avaliar a qualidade dos agrupamentos gerados, foi obtido quando 3 variáveis foram retidas. Os agrupamentos gerados por tais variáveis refletem o comportamento de compra de mídia dos clientes; os agrupamentos foram considerados satisfatórios quando avaliados por especialistas do Grupo RBS. / The change in the behavior of consumers with the advent of technology and social networks generates a great empowerment of themselves, substantially altering the relationship form of companies to their final audience. Attentive to this market, media companies undergo profound changes, both from the point of view of delivering content to their audience, as well as in their administrative, strategic and financial format. Thus, the present dissertation presents approaches supported by multivariate techniques for the composition of commercial and remuneration teams of the sales group of a communication company. In article 1, the objective is to generate a model to estimate the commercial awards of the sales teams of the RBS Group radios. To do this, we initially generate groupings of radio stations from the RBS Group in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina based on their profiles of similarities. For each cluster generated, a multiple linear regression of the commercial award is generated, validated through cross validation through the adjusted R2 and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The second article addresses the clustering of RBS Group top clients and the impact on the composition of business teams through the variable selection method. The original 7 variables were evaluated through the variable selection method "Omit one variable at a time"; the best Silhouette Index (SI) average, metric used to evaluate the quality of the generated clusters, was obtained when 3 variables were retained. Clusters generated by such variables reflect customers' buying behavior of media; the clusters were considered satisfactory when evaluated by RBS Group experts.

A mudança de comportamento dos consumidores através do advento da tecnologia e das redes sociais gera um grande empoderamento dos mesmos, alterando substancialmente a forma de relacionamento das empresas com seu público final. Atentas a este mercado, as empresas de mídia passam por profundas mudanças, tanto do ponto de vista da entrega de conteúdo ao seu público, quanto no seu formato administrativo, estratégico e financeiro. Sendo assim, a presente dissertação apresenta abordagens apoiadas em técnicas multivariadas para composição de equipes comerciais e de remuneração dos times de venda de uma empresa de comunicação. No artigo 1, objetiva-se gerar um modelo para estimar a premiação comercial das equipes de venda das rádios do Grupo RBS. Para tanto, inicialmente geram-se agrupamentos das emissoras de rádio do Grupo RBS no estado do Rio Grande do Sul e de Santa Catarina com base nos seus perfis de similaridades. Para cada cluster gerado, gera-se uma regressão linear múltipla da premiação comercial validado através de validação cruzada por intermédio do R2 ajustado e Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). O segundo artigo aborda a clusterização dos top clientes do Grupo RBS e o impacto na composição das equipes comerciais por meio do método da seleção de variáveis. As 7 variáveis originais foram avaliadas através do método de seleção de variáveis “Omita uma variável por vez”; o melhor Silhouette Index (SI) médio, métrica utilizada para avaliar a qualidade dos agrupamentos gerados, foi obtido quando 3 variáveis foram retidas. Os agrupamentos gerados por tais variáveis refletem o comportamento de compra de mídia dos clientes; os agrupamentos foram considerados satisfatórios quando avaliados por especialistas do Grupo RBS. / The change in the behavior of consumers with the advent of technology and social networks generates a great empowerment of themselves, substantially altering the relationship form of companies to their final audience. Attentive to this market, media companies undergo profound changes, both from the point of view of delivering content to their audience, as well as in their administrative, strategic and financial format. Thus, the present dissertation presents approaches supported by multivariate techniques for the composition of commercial and remuneration teams of the sales group of a communication company. In article 1, the objective is to generate a model to estimate the commercial awards of the sales teams of the RBS Group radios. To do this, we initially generate groupings of radio stations from the RBS Group in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina based on their profiles of similarities. For each cluster generated, a multiple linear regression of the commercial award is generated, validated through cross validation through the adjusted R2 and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The second article addresses the clustering of RBS Group top clients and the impact on the composition of business teams through the variable selection method. The original 7 variables were evaluated through the variable selection method "Omit one variable at a time"; the best Silhouette Index (SI) average, metric used to evaluate the quality of the generated clusters, was obtained when 3 variables were retained. Clusters generated by such variables reflect customers' buying behavior of media; the clusters were considered satisfactory when evaluated by RBS Group experts.

This study offers insight into the perceived leadership behaviour of sales managers in a pharmaceutical organisation in South Africa. The study specifically investigated the extent of the relationship between leadership behaviour of sales managers and motivation of sales teams during the implementation of strategic alliances. The study followed a mixed methods approach and had a correlational research design. The population in this study was the fifty four (54) sales representatives and their respective sales managers of the six sales teams identified, who are directly responsible for implementing strategic alliances. The population was demarcated into six (6) sales teams with each team reporting to a separate sales manager. Inferential and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The quantitative data were analysed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r). The qualitative component was analysed using a content analysis. The findings of the correlation analysis suggest that an overall positive and moderate relationship exist between autocratic leadership behaviour of sales managers and the motivation of sales teams. A similar relationship exists between team leadership and extrinsic motivation. A positive and weak relationship exists between directive and supportive leadership and motivation. Similarly, a positive and weak relationship exists between team leadership and intrinsic motivation. However, the extent to which these relationships exist varies between the sales teams. The findings of the content analysis indicate that task-oriented leadership behaviour may exert the strongest motivator for sales teams when implementing strategic alliances. / Business Management / M. Com. (Business Management)