Incentives in Sales Teams: Utilizing Collaboration or Competition? Or Both?
U.S. employees spend an average of 5.3 hours each week seeking advice from coworkers.1 For salespeople, this exchange of knowledge is especially important because the selling process is filled with uncertainty. Advice from colleagues helps reduce that uncertainty and can improve performance. However, sales environments differ from many other professions because they are shaped by both individual competition and collective goals. Sales contests,2 bench programs,3 and tiered reward systems often encourage rivalry, while team-based incentives usually emphasize collaboration.4 The presence of both types of incentives creates a setting where competition and cooperation coexist, making it unclear how advice seeking and advice giving unfold.
To better understand this dynamic, we collected data on 540 salespeople at a leading business-to-business company. We investigated how team and individual incentives influence whether advice is sought or given, and how the composition of advice givers shapes its usefulness for improving performance. The expectation was that advice given under high team incentives would be helpful and constructive, while advice given under high individual incentives might be self-interested, misleading, or incomplete because of competitive motives.
Studies and their Significance
The first study examined the determinants of advice exchange and revealed that salespeople exchange advice relatively rarely. When advice was sought, it was usually reciprocated, but popular advice givers and frequent advice seekers did not emerge as they often do in other organizational contexts. The findings showed that individual incentives encouraged salespeople to seek advice, likely out of a desire to improve, but reduced their willingness to give advice because of the risks of helping a competitor. Team incentives, on the other hand, encouraged advice giving because of the need to support teammates but discouraged advice seeking as that might shift the focus away from one’s own contribution. In other words, individual incentives motivated advice seeking but discouraged advice giving, while team incentives motivated advice giving but discouraged advice seeking.
Our second study turned to the performance consequences of advice seeking. Using sales revenue as an objective measure of performance, we explored whether advice helped salespeople achieve better results. The analysis showed that advice seeking could improve performance, but only under certain conditions. Advice from peers with diverse perspectives shaped by individual incentives tended to be more useful, since those perspectives provided multiple ways of thinking about competition and strategy. Advice from peers with diverse perspectives shaped by team incentives, however, was less effective and sometimes harmful, suggesting that collective-oriented insights did not translate as well to individual outcomes. This study also found that salespeople with longer company tenure or longer tenure in a specific unit were less likely to seek or give advice, which highlights how experience and stability can reduce openness to collaboration.
What Does This Mean for Real Estate Professionals?
For real estate professionals, where individual commissions, office-wide targets, and firm-level goals often overlap, these findings carry important implications. Like salespeople in other industries, real estate agents work in environments where success depends on both competition and collaboration. Advice seeking can be crucial in navigating client negotiations, responding to unpredictable markets, and refining sales strategies.
The research suggests that managers and team leaders should be careful in how they balance incentives. When team and individual incentives operate simultaneously, they create opposing pressures that can limit advice exchange. A more effective approach is to align team incentives with collaborative tasks such as joint marketing efforts or lead generation while reserving individual incentives for personal performance outcomes. The study also shows that advice is most valuable when it comes from colleagues with diverse perspectives and experiences, which means that real estate professionals should intentionally build networks that reach beyond their immediate peers. Finally, since tenure within a company or unit can discourage collaboration, managers may want to encourage horizontal career paths or rotate team assignments to keep advice exchange active.
Ultimately, advice seeking remains a powerful way for professionals to reduce uncertainty and improve performance, but the results of this study remind us that incentives shape whether advice is given freely, whether it is trusted, and whether it contributes meaningfully to success. For real estate professionals, the balance between competition and collaboration is delicate, and careful incentive design can make the difference between advice that empowers and advice that falls flat.
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Recommended Reading
Homburg, Christian, Theresa Schyma, Sebastian Hohenberg, Yashar Atefi, and Robin-Christopher Ruhnau (2024), “‘Coopetition’ in the Presence of Team and Individual Incentives: Evidence from the Advice Network of a Sales Organization,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 52, 306-328. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00939-1
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References
Panopto (2018), “Inefficient Knowledge Sharing Costs Businesses $47 Million Annually.”
- Kalra, Ajay and Mengze Shi (2001), “Designing Optimal Sales Contests: A Theoretical Perspective,” Marketing Science, 20(2), 170-193.
- Boichuk, Jeffrey P., Raghu Bommaraju, Michael Ahearne, Florian Kraus, and Thomas J. Steenburgh (2019), “Managing Laggards: The Importance of a Deep Sales Bench,” Journal of Marketing Research, 56(4), 652-665.
- Thompson, Leigh L. (2018), Making the Team: A Guide for Managers (6th ed.), Pearson.
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About the Authors
Christian Homburg, PhD
Chair of Business-to-Business Marketing, Sales & Pricing, University of Mannheim (Germany)
Dr. Christian Homburg (PhD – University of Karlsruhe) is a leading scholar in marketing, specializing in business-to-business markets, customer relationship management, and sales management. His research has been published in the field’s top journals and has earned him international recognition, including his appointment as an AMA Fellow. In addition to his academic contributions, he has held leadership roles in industry and is the founder of Homburg & Partner, a global management consultancy focused on marketing and sales strategy. His career reflects a commitment to bridging rigorous academic research with practical application, influencing both scholarly discourse and business practice worldwide.
Theresa R. Schyma, PhD
Researcher, Siemens
Dr. Theresa R. Schyma (PhD – University of Mannheim) is a researcher whose work bridges sales organizations, collaboration, and incentive design. Her research has contributed to this field with publications in leading international journals such as the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and has been recognized with several awards, including from the Bundesverband Direktvertrieb e. V. (Federal Association of Direct Selling). With years of applying research findings in various industries in management consulting projects, her current role at Siemens in Munich focusses on enabling universities to become energy-efficient and future-ready.
Sebastian Hohenberg, PhD
Full Professor and Chair of Digital Transformation, University of Münster (Germany)
Dr. Sebastian Hohenberg (PhD – University of Mannheim) is a marketing strategy scholar whose work focuses on how businesses can grow organically, with an emphasis on sales steering, marketing management, and incentive systems. He has published in leading journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Before his current position, he served on the faculty at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, and held junior faculty roles at Mannheim. His research often involves collaboration with industry partners across sectors such as automotive, chemicals, construction, and manufacturing, bringing rigorous theory into applied settings.
Yashar Atefi, PhD
Evelyn and Jay G. Piccinati Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Denver
Dr. Yashar Atefi (PhD – University of Houston) is a scholar of sales management and marketing strategy whose work spans sales performance, incentive design, training, compensation, sales leadership, negotiations, and sales funnel dynamics. He has held leadership roles in several research institutes, including serving as founding director of the Sales Leadership Center. His research has appeared in top marketing journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal ofMarketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He has received multiple prestigious awards from the American Marketing Association and other organizations for both research and teaching excellence.
Robin-Christopher M. Ruhnau, PhD
Assistant Professor of Digital Marketing, Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt (Germany)
Dr. Robin-Christopher M. Ruhnau (PhD – University of Mannheim) focuses on sales and customer relationship management, particularly with regard to value creation. His dissertation examined empirically how targeted win-back measures influence not just repurchase but also engagement behaviors like feedback, referrals, and data sharing. His work has earned recognition, including the University Sales Center Alliance Research Grant Award. He co-authors research on topics ranging from recovering lost customers to dispelling lay beliefs about B2B sales and has contributed to studies about defensive behavior in pricing negotiations and salespeople’s cross-selling efforts.
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KCRR 2026 March - Incentives in Sales Teams-Collaboration or Competition (Schyma)
