Leadership as Situational Factor on Personality-Performance Relationship: An Empirical Study of the Taiwan's Office Machinery Sales Force (2012)

INTRODUCTION Those responsible for personal selling in a company are commonly called salesmen, salespeople, or sales representatives. Within a company's sales management structure, they are responsible for creating business revenue. For a sales-oriented business, salespeople play a crucial role, and a business's expenditures for its sales force often exceed that for its other sales tools (Anderson, 1985), especially when the company sells products that require the heavy involvement of salespersons or that have complicated sales structures, such as in the office machinery, life insurance, automobile, and real estate industries. In these industries, customers need more information and a higher degree of service while making their decision, and so salespersons have the opportunity to play a larger role and exert a greater influence. Personal selling is increasingly perceived as a critical contributor to a company's success (Boone and Kurtz, 1992). The most valuable asset for 21st century businesses is their knowledge workers and their productive capacity (Drucker, 1999). Salespeople are a company's pioneers. From the customer's perspective, they transmit all of the information about the company, including its products, service, and corporate image. Personal selling can be a way to build and maintain effective customer-firm relationships that will benefit the company (Manning and Reece, 1998). For that reason, even though there are many uncontrollable factors that affect a company's sales, its human resources (department) should be especially careful and diligent in its recruitment, training, education, retention, and deployment of its sales people, as they hope that they can find outstanding sales people and through training, motivation, and guidance raise their performance to a high level. This may be especially true for those office machinery companies in Taiwan, because they are in a very demanding business environment nowadays. Office machinery is a typical sales-oriented business, as competition heightened in recent years, first-line salespersons have been under tremendous working pressure. To secure a better performing sales force, the 'right' persons should be selected in the first place, i.e. other criteria being equal, 'right' personality should be considered at the recruitment stage. Numerous studies have shown that personality traits have a large influence on worker's behavior and attitude (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Barrick, Mount and Judge, 2001; Hogan and Holland, 2003; Tett, Jackson and Rothstein, 1991). The Big Five, or Five-Factor Model (FFM), i.e. Emotional Stability (negative indication of Neuroticism), Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (Costa and McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1981), all have been shown more or less positively affecting sales performance, and become a critical criterion for personnel selection (Rothstein and Goffin, 2006). However, the relationship between personality and job performance could be influenced by innumerous exogenous variables. The effects of a great many of these variables can be reasoned and explained theoretically by weak vs. strong situations conceptualized by Mischel (1977). In strong situations, the expression of personality is constrained, behavior performed, or job performance as one of the outcome behaviors in human resource management, is therefore more a function of the situation than of personality; whereas individual dispositions are more relied on to direct action than outside expectations in weak situations (Barrick and Mount, 1993; Beaty, Cleveland and Murphy, 2001). Of so many possible situations imposed on working environment, leadership style is one of the most common factors (Meyer, Dala and Hermida, 2010). The interaction between salespeople and their company or department supervisor is one of the most intimate of all work relationships. Sager and Futrell (1989) pointed out that the leadership style is an important factor influencing sales performance. …