Personal characteristics, trust, conflict, and effectiveness in marketingsales working relationships

Purpose The key objective of this research is to test how two trust dimensions cognitionbased trust and affectbased trust mediate the effects of three personal characteristics psychological distance, the marketing manager's sales experience, and the marketing manager's relative level of formal education on the following outcome variables dysfunctional conflict, functional conflict, and perceived relationship effectiveness. Designmethodologyapproach Drawing on the interaction approach, the paper develops a conceptual framework to better understand the nature of the working relationship between marketing managers and sales managers. In total, it develops and test 13 hypotheses. Partial least squares was used to assess the validity of the measures, and to estimate the structural model. Using a crosssectional design, data were collected from 101 marketing managers in Australia. Findings The hypothesized model has high explanatory power and it was found that both trust dimensions strongly affected all three outcome variables. However, though both forms of trust were positively related to perceived relationship effectiveness, affectbased trust had the strongest impact on this outcome. The results also confirm that both cognition and affectbased trust have negative effects on dysfunctional conflict, and strong positive effects on functional conflict. In addition to these new findings, the paper shows that while psychological distance has a strong negative impact on cognitionbased trust, it has no impact on affectbased trust. Moreover, it was found that when marketing managers had greater levels of sales experience, it increased their affectbased trust but it had no impact on cognitionbased trust. Finally, the marketing manager's relative level of formal education had no impact on either forms of trust. Originalityvalue This is one of a handful of studies to employ a largescale empirical approach to examine the neglected crossfunctional relationship between marketing and sales. Also, it is one of the few studies to examine the effects of cognitionbased trust and affectbased trust on performance outcomes.