Sales force motivation, control system, and compensation & incentive research in the first half of the 21st century

The sales landscape has dramatically transformed in the last 20 years. Many of these changes were unanticipated by either sales practitioners or sales scholars at the time of the 2005 Special Issue on Advancing the Field of Selling and Sales Management, published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Importantly, these shifts in complex selling environments are drastically transforming contemporary selling approaches, sales organization structures, and salesperson roles, raising numerous novel questions and challenges for sales management in the domains of motivation, control, and compensation & incentive (MCCI) systems. Therefore, this paper aims to update the observations on MCCI research presented by Brown, Jones, and Leigh (Citation2005) in the 2005 Special Issue, to document and stimulate further advances in sales research and practice in these domains. Specifically, this study pursues the following three objectives: (i) Review the progress in research over the last two decades on MCCI systems issues raised by Brown et al.; (ii) review academic and practitioner literatures on new questions about MCCI systems arising from disruptive shifts in today’s evolving selling environment, and (iii) propose an updated agenda and directions for future integrative and cross-disciplinary theoretical and empirical research on MCCI systems.