The stories that B2B salespeople tell in online job reviews: Three essays

This dissertation offers insights into B2B salesforce deployment by analyzing the words in over 50,000 job reviews written by B2B salespeople on Glassdoor and relating the words to their job satisfaction. In essay 1, building on narrative psychology, I used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) to score the "W5" elements (who, what, when, where, and why) that constitute stories B2B salespeople tell. I analyzed differences in word patterns and uncovered four clusters representing corporate cultures: Work Rewards, Work-Life Balance, Workplace Malaise, and Toxic Interactions. In essay 2, I further explored the links between corporate culture and the linguistic characteristics of job reviews. I adopted Sull, Turconi, and Sull's (2020) Big 9 scores on nine cultural values: agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. I adopted a Multi-Dimension Scaling approach based on the Big 9 scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on the corporate profile map uncovered differences in word choices across the profiles. Insights from these two essays can help sales managers understand how B2B salespeople perceive corporate culture and attract talent that can enhance the cultural fit. In essay 3, I focused on the emotions articulated in the words in the job reviews by considering Ekman's (1992) six basic emotions: Anger, Fear, Surprise, Disgust, Joy, and Sadness. I used the NRC emotion lexicon (Mohammad & Turney, 2013) to measure the emotions expressed in B2B salespeople's job reviews of current and former employers. I found three patterns. First, former employees show more joy than current employees when the company rating is three stars or more. Second, all six emotions significantly explain company ratings for current employees, while Surprise was the only insignificant emotion for former employees' company ratings. Third, Joy and Sadness increase as company rating rises for former employees. Understanding these emotional differences contributes to the B2B sales research literature and suggests ways in which sales managers can retain salespeople. Overall, insights from this dissertation also serve as a model for firms considering new automated text analysis approaches to studying employee engagement on social media.