A Study on the Factors Influencing on the Salesperson's Resistance to SFA

Abstract

Sales Force Automation (SFA) is a strategic information system and one of the components of operational CRM system. SFA supports salespeople’s activities such as selection of potential customers, creative value proposition, after-sales services, etc. SFA is increasingly used in many companies because it has the advantages to raise the salespeople’s productivity by developing forecasting ability, value proposition ability, after sales service ability etc. Many researches have shown that implementation of SFA leads to the increase of salepeople performance, organizational performance, and quality of customer relationship. However, Some prior studies have discussed on the SFA implementation failure and pointed out that one of important causes of this failure is salespeople’s resistance to SFA. Although many researches explain SFA acceptance phenomenon using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), these researches didn’t deeply investigate the salespeople’s resistance to SFA. Therefore, this study focuses on the factors influencing salespeople’s resistance to SFA and the relationships among these factors. This study identified three factors (salespeople’s perceived loss of power, perceived loss of autonomy, and perceived time and effort waste) influencing salespeople’s resistance to SFA. The hypotheses testing results showed that salespeople’s perceived loss of power and perceived time and effort waste significantly increased salespeople’s resistance to SFA. And salespeople’s perceived loss of power plays a mediating role between perceived loss of autonomy/perceived time and effort waste and salespeople’s resistance to SFA. At the end of the paper, theoretical and managerial implications of this study and the limitations and future research directions are discussed.