JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Marketing Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Marketing.Agency and related theories have proven useful as theoretical frameworks for examining relationships between principals and their agents in many disciplines. However, though marketing involves a wide array of agency relationships, agency-based research has only recently begun to be reported in the marketing literature. The authors therefore attempt to clarify the marketing implications of agency theory by describing its major constructs, the two different types of models embedded within the theory, and some closely related theoretical structures. They also critically review past and potential agency-based research in marketing and suggest ways in which marketers might contribute to improving its validity and usefulness. AGENCYtheory has spawned a large amount of recent research in economics, finance, accounting, organizational behavior, political science, and sociology. Its proponents prophesy that a revolution is at hand, that agency and related theories can greatly improve our understanding of why organizations exist and how they work (Hesterly, Liebeskind, and Zenger 1990). Some scholars, however, are troubled by these theories' underlying assumptions about human behavior and organizational processes (Donaldson 1990). A few detractors brand them minimalist, tautological, trivial, and even dangerous (Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Perrow 1986).

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The authors use meta-analysis techniques to investigate the evidence that has been gathered on the determinants of salespeople's performance. A search of the published and unpublished literature uncovered 116 articles (the list of which is available upon request) that yielded 1653 reported associations between performance and determinants of that performance. The results indicate the determinants can be ordered in the following way in terms of the average size of their association with performance: (1) role variables, (2) skill, (3) motivation, (4) personal factors, (5) aptitude, and (6) organizational/environmental factors. When ordered according to the amount of the observed variation in correlations across studies that is real variation (i.e., not attributable to sampling error), the determinants rank as follows: (1) personal factors, (2) skill, (3) role variables, (4) aptitude, (5) motivation, and (6) organizational/environmental factors. To investigate whether the associations between each of the categories of predictors and performance could be partially accounted for by the presence of moderator variables, the results were broken out by customer type, product type, and type of dependent measure used. The results indicate that the strength of the relationship between the major determinants and salespeople's performance is affected by the type of products salespeople sell. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for sales managers and researchers.

The authors develop a framework for examining how and why marketing personnel interact with personnel in other functional areas in planning, implementing, and evaluating marketing activities. Building on theoretical developments from social systems theory and resource dependence models, they provide a general framework that can be used to understand such interaction across different functional areas and different types of marketing positions. A partial test of this framework based on the responses of 151 managers in three different divisions of a Fortune 500 firm shows preliminary support for the propositions developed.