The impact of organizational citizenship behavior on evaluations of salesperson performance (original) (raw)

1993, The Journal of Marketing

The research objective was to examine the relative impact of "organizational citizenship behaviors" (OeBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers' evaluations of the performance of their sales personnel. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for three diverse sales samples: (1) 261 multiline insurance agents, (2) 204 petrochemical sales representatives, and (3) 108 district sales managers working for a large pharmaceutical company. Managerial evaluations of organizational citizenship behavior and overall performance were also obtained for each of these people. The results indicate that (1) managers do recognize several different dimensions of "citizenship" behavior, and these OeBs are distinct from objective sales productivity, (2) the combination of OeBs and objective sales productivity accounts for substantially more variance in managers' overall evaluations than typically is accounted for by sales productivity alone, and (3) the OeBs (taken as a group) consistently account for a larger portion of the variance in managerial evaluations than does sales productivity. The implications of these findings for salesforce motivation and evaluation are discussed. A CCORDING to one of the most widely held definitions, salesperson "performance" is " ... behavior evaluated in terms of its contribution to the goals of the organization. Performance, in other words, has a normative element reflecting whether a salesperson's behavior is 'good' or 'bad' in light of the organization's goals and objectives" (Churchill, Ford, and Walker 1990, p. 729, italics added). Because "performance" represents a salesperson's overall contribution to the success of an organization, it is not surprising that it has received considerable attention in the marketing literature (see Churchill et al. 1985). Nor is it surprising that sales managers base many of their most important decisions (e.g., promotions, transfers, compensation, providing feedback, select