The interaction effects of adhocracy culture, work experience on information acquisition and job performance of bank salespeople

In view of increasing competition and stricter lending criteria within the corporate banking space, the banking salesforce is expected to aggressively market services and solutions while being mindfully consistent with its risk management policies. Hence, absorbing cues from the market allows them to keep themselves abreast with current developments that might affect their customers’ portfolio performance. Drawing on the sense-making theory, this study investigates the moderation and joint moderation effects of adhocracy (or innovative) culture and work experience on the link between information acquisition and job performance of B2B salespeople within the banking industry. We established two-way and three-way interaction models on a set of data involving 539 B2B salespeople from 18 Malaysian banks. The results indicate that (i) adhocracy culture significantly moderates the effects of information acquisition on job performance, and (ii) the moderating effect is contingent upon the employees’ work experience. Theoretically, our findings suggest boundary conditions for market-oriented behavior effectiveness that are conditioned upon the varying levels of work experience and adhocracy culture. In practise, managers should consider instilling inventive and heuristic thinking among the salespeople to help them gather market intelligence and customer knowledge more effectively and reduce their cognitive load in the face of information overload and rapidly evolving technologies.