Impacts of Intra-Team and Inter-Team Social Capital on Adaptive Selling and Performance in B2B Cross-Functional Sales Teams: Empirical Evidence from China

Abstract Despite the benefits of B2B cross-functional sales team, it poses a managerial challenge how to integrate and coordinate the efforts of team members to perform complex sales tasks in an adaptive way. This article investigates the impacts of intra-team (within the sales team) and inter-team (between sales team and purchasing team) social capitals on adaptive selling and sales performance of B2B cross-functional sales teams. The 317 valid survey data from 73 cross-functional sales team indicate that intra-team and inter-team social capitals positively facilitate adaptive selling and sales performance. Besides, these main effects are positively moderated by intra-team heterogeneity, inter-team ties similarity and sales complexity factors. This article contributes to adaptive selling literature by shifting analysis unit from individual salesperson to B2B sales team, drawing on social capital theory, and considering moderation effects of team composition characteristics and sales task complexity factors. It suggests B2B cross-functional sales teams to develop high quality intra-team and inter-team social capitals, and form higher level of intra-team heterogeneity and inter-team tie similarity, to facilitate team adaptive selling. In addition, the sales team should encourage the team members to adopt AS technique, especially under the situations of sales task complexities, in order to improve sales performance. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT