Chicken or egg? Sequential complementarity among salesforce control mechanisms

Firms struggle with salesforce control, particularly as typical piecemeal approaches overlook the nuance that the effect of a control is amplified or muted by a context created by other simultaneously deployed controls. recent studies showing interactions between formal controls caution that control mechanisms must be examined as a portfolio. this study takes the next step in addressing how widely-studied formal controls interact with understudied input control and informal control in a salesforce control portfolio. we introduce the idea of sequential complementarity—when deploying a control mechanism enhances marginal returns from increasing a temporally preceding one—within a control portfolio to explain those interactions. we use data from 120 apparel manufacturers and 94 retailers to show that the performance benefits of formal control mechanisms depend on precedence by input control. these effects flip in the presence of informal control. our unique contribution is theoretically introducing temporality into “holochronic” control theory to explain interactions of formal with informal control mechanisms.