Picture a sales manager who opens every team meeting with the same message: hit the quarterly number, and nothing else really matters. Over time, the salespeople reporting to that manager may start to think the same way, chasing quick wins even when it means cutting corners with the customers they are supposed to be building lasting relationships with. But not every salesperson responds to that pressure in the same way. What makes some resist it?
A study published in the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing looks at this question among salespeople who sell to other businesses. The research examines how a manager’s narrow focus on financial results can spread to the people they supervise, and what tends to soften that effect. The central finding is that a salesperson’s personal moral values and the structure of their pay both appear to shape whether a bottom-line obsession actually damages their customer relationships.
The problem with looking only at the numbers
The researchers center their work on a concept they call “bottom-line mentality,” which they describe as “one-dimensional thinking that revolves around securing bottom-line outcomes to the neglect of competing priorities.” In plain terms, it is the habit of caring about profit and performance numbers so much that other things, like ethics, quality, and how you treat people, fade into the background.
Charles H. Schwepker Jr. of the University of Central Missouri and Megan C. Good of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, set out to understand how this mindset moves from a supervisor to a salesperson, and what happens to customer relationships as a result. They point out that this matters in business-to-business sales, where deals often take a long time to close and depend on trust between buyer and seller. A salesperson focused only on this month’s quota may skip the slow, patient work that builds those long-term partnerships.
Two factors sit at the heart of their investigation. The first is “moral identity,” which the authors define, drawing on earlier research, as how central moral traits like honesty, fairness, and compassion are to a person’s sense of who they are. As they put it, it is the difference between someone who simply feels honest and someone who “acts honestly even when no one is watching.” The second factor is the mix of a salesperson’s pay, specifically how much comes as a fixed salary versus variable pay like commissions and bonuses.
How the study was built
To test their ideas, the researchers surveyed business-to-business salespeople recruited through Prolific, an online research platform. They started with people in the United States who worked full time in sales and business development, then narrowed the group to those who sold to business customers. After removing retailers, people who failed an attention check, and incomplete responses, they were left with a final sample of 227 salespeople.
The group was a little more than half male, about 38 years old on average, with roughly 11 years of sales experience and a median income of $70,000. They worked across services, wholesaling, manufacturing, and other industries. Participants answered questions measuring their moral identity, their own bottom-line mentality, their perception of their supervisor’s bottom-line mentality, and how often they engaged in customer-relationship-building behaviors. They also reported what percentage of their income came from fixed salary rather than commission or bonus.
The authors then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling, which lets researchers test several proposed relationships among variables at once, to see whether their predictions held up.
What the analysis revealed
The first result was a strong link between a manager’s mindset and a salesperson’s. When salespeople perceived their supervisor as having a bottom-line mentality, they were considerably more likely to hold that same mentality themselves. The researchers describe this as a “trickle-down effect,” consistent with the idea that employees learn how to behave by watching their bosses.
The second finding involves moral identity. The data suggest that a strong moral identity tends to weaken that trickle-down effect. Salespeople who saw traits like honesty and fairness as central to who they are were less likely to absorb their supervisor’s bottom-line focus. The authors interpret this as moral identity acting like a buffer, helping people hold onto their own values even when a boss signals that only the numbers count.
Third, the study found that a salesperson’s bottom-line mentality was negatively linked to customer-relationship-building behaviors. Put simply, the more a salesperson fixated on bottom-line results, the less they tended to do the relationship work, like listening closely to customer concerns, solving problems, and developing mutually profitable partnerships.
The fourth finding concerns pay. The researchers found that the percentage of fixed compensation changed the strength of that negative link. When a larger share of a salesperson’s income was guaranteed salary, the damage that a bottom-line mentality did to their relationship-building behaviors was smaller. When more of their pay rode on commissions and bonuses, the negative effect was stronger. The authors connect this to the idea that pay structures shape behavior: guaranteed pay appears to take some of the pressure off chasing immediate results.
One control variable in the analysis is worth a mention. More experienced salespeople tended to engage in more relationship-building behaviors, while age on its own showed no significant connection.
What it might mean for sales organizations
The authors draw several practical suggestions from their results, while framing them as informed recommendations rather than proven fixes. Because a manager’s mindset appears to spread to the team, they argue that supervisors should be mindful of how they come across. A manager who pushes too hard on quotas may unintentionally signal that nothing but the bottom line matters, even if that is not the intent. They suggest evaluating salespeople not only on whether they hit their numbers but on how those numbers are reached.
Given the apparent protective role of moral identity, the researchers suggest that organizations pay attention to it during recruitment, mentoring, coaching, and training. They float the idea of assessing traits like honesty, fairness, and compassion when hiring, and of having salespeople with strong moral identities mentor newer hires. They also recommend training focused on active listening and empathy, so that doing right by customers becomes a genuine priority.
On compensation, the authors suggest that companies aiming for long-term customer relationships may want to lean somewhat more on fixed pay. Variable pay is effective at driving short-term results like meeting quotas, they note, but their findings suggest it can come at the cost of relationship building.
Some important caveats
The authors are candid about the study’s limits. The data come from salespeople’s own self-reports, which means the measure of a supervisor’s mentality reflects the salesperson’s perception rather than the supervisor’s actual outlook. The researchers argue that perception is what drives behavior anyway, but they suggest future work could gather supervisors’ and customers’ views directly.
The study is also a snapshot taken at a single point in time, which means it cannot establish cause and effect. The researchers note that a supervisor’s bottom-line focus may shift from week to week, so results could vary depending on when the data were collected. They also studied only United States salespeople, and they caution that management styles differ across countries. Long-term studies, they suggest, would help confirm whether these relationships hold over time.
