Unpacking the salesperson's ambidextrous internal network (AIN): The influence of bridging and bonding social capital on performance growth trajectories

While recent work has demonstrated that both bridging and bonding social capital in internal sales networks can increase sales performance, critical questions remain unanswered, most notably: (1) how salespeople should both apply and manage these two forms of intraorganizational social capital simultaneously? (2) What the potential moderating effects of unexplored yet compelling boundary-condition social identification variables might be? And (3) what the implications of this are on sales performance over time (rather than cross-sectionally). Drawing on social capital theory, this work combines multi-firm survey data with objective performance measures assessed longitudinally across two different industry contexts. Findings reveal that: (1) while organizational identification positively affects the salesperson's ambidextrous internal network (AIN), team identification actually interacts with organizational identification to decrease, not improve, it; (2) incentives for reciprocity mitigate this negative effect; and (3) these factors all coalesce on the salesperson's performance growth trajectory over time in sometimes related, and sometimes idiosyncratic, ways.