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Department of Marketing

Marketing professor wins award for research on knowledge hoarding behavior of salespeople

By Esther Swilley

Edward Nowlin, assistant professor of marketing, won the Best Paper in Sales Track 2015 from the Society for Marketing Advances.

The Society for Marketing Advances (SMA) is a premier marketing association that hosts an annual conference that brings together marketing educators and professionals from throughout the United States and abroad.

The paper titled “Understanding Hoarding Behavior in Sales,” is coauthored with Nwamaka A. Anaza, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Nowlin presented the paper at the SMA conference in San Antonio, TX in November. Edward Nowlin

According to Nowlin, “Many contend that hoarding makes very little sense in sales organizations that applaud knowledge sharing. Others call knowledge hoarding an obsolete concept in today’s search engine age. Despite this, knowledge hoarding remains a systematic and intrinsic sales issue, for which an analysis exploring salesperson knowledge hoarding behavior does not yet exist. This research examines antecedents of knowledge hoarding behavior in sales.”  Nowlin and Anaza found that factors related to incentives, personality and the organizational environment, indirectly influence knowledge hoarding behavior through withholding efforts.