There exists heightened research attention afforded to the pivotal demands - both internal and external - that exist within the salesperson role set. Unprecedented pressures on salespersons to acquire, retain, and build enduring customer relationships to enhance the firm's bottom-line performance coincides with increasing complexities within the work environment. This relevant and timely research introduces an original construct derived from the long-standing attention afforded to relationship selling, relational incongruity that exists within the buyer-seller exchange. Relational incongruity, defined, is the relational tension spawned between the salesperson, the customer, and the firm when situational psychological incongruity exists within the buyer-seller exchange itself. Framed in resource-advantage theory, this research investigates divergent demands and the increasing complexity of sales relationships through the lens of relational incongruity. A research program based on minimizing relational incongruity will augment the sales management and B2B literature by looking at how he salesperson and the customer build strong relationships as well as the antecedents that can undermine these relationships by generating realtional incongruity.

This dissertation research explores the factors that influence direct selling agents' sales performance and job satisfaction. In the direct selling channels, the agents not only sell the products to customers. They may concurrently perform a "distributor" role as a stand-alone entity composed of their own sales network. This dissertation research features two essays. The first essay investigates how direct selling agents' perceptions of control and sense of belonging relate to PO. This essay further explores how PO influences job performance and job satisfaction. Results suggest that perception of control and sense of belonging fuel PO. Furthermore, leader-member exchange mediates the relationship between PO and sales performance, as well as PO and job satisfaction in direct selling networks. The second essay introduces a new construct (relational incongruity) and discusses how complex sales environments and direct selling agents' organizational structures influence the relational incongruity in their organization and its ensuring effect on sales performance and job satisfaction. The results indicate that organizational complexity is positively related to relational incongruity. However, customer complexity has a negative impact on relational incongruity. Relational incongruity in direct selling agents' organizations has negative effects on job satisfaction but has no effects on sales performance. Epistemic curiosity undermines the negative effect of relational incongruity on job satisfaction but negatively influences independent distributors' sales performance.