Exploring Emotional Competence: Its effects on coping, social capital, and performance of salespeople

We define emotional competence as a person’s domain-specific working model about how one can appropriately manage one’s emotions within interpersonal situations. Emotional competence is conceived as the integration of seven seemingly unrelated proficiencies: perspective taking, strategic self-presentation of emotions, helping targets of communication accept one’s genuine emotional reactions, lack of guilt when using emotions strategically, fostering self-authenticity, developing an ironic perspective, and incorporating one’s moral code into the self-regulation of emotions. A cluster analysis of responses to measures of the seven proficiencies by 220 salespeople revealed four distinct groups of people. The groups were defined by emotional competence syndromes consisting of combinations of different levels of the seven proficiencies. One group, the highly emotional competent, scored high on all seven proficiencies, a second group scored low on all seven. Two other groups resulted wherein one group was dominated by feelings of guilt in the use of emotions strategically, and the second was characterized by the inability to accept ambiguous and contradictory situations by assuming an ironic perspective. In a test of predictive validity, the highly emotional competent group, but not the others, coped effectively with envy and pride, achieved high social capital, and performed well.coping;emotion regulation;emotional competence;social capital and performance

Account Managers Creation of Social Capital: Communal and Instrumental Investments and Performance Implications

Account managers invest in two distinct, compensatory social ties to achieve social capital, namely peripheral knowledge ties and implementation support ties. The first ties require communal investments, which consist of organizational citizenship behaviors and peripheral information sharing. The second ties require instrumental investments that encompass reciprocity norms and strategic information sharing. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 164 account managers who sell financial products/services to large customers. The findings show that account managers invest in both ties to attain peripheral knowledge accretion and implementation support which in turn result in improved performance.reciprocity;account management;social capital;organizational citizenship behaviors

Coping with Sales Call Anxiety and Its Effects on Protective Actions

We study how salespeople cope with sales call anxiety and find that two tactics ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions in selling interactions. That is, situation modification and attentional deployment both moderate the effects of felt physiological sensations and anxiety on protective actions.attentional deployment;coping;sales call anxiety;situation modification

The Adaptive Consequences of Pride in Personal Selling

Study 1 investigates the beneficial effects of experiencing pride. Pride was found to have two different effects. First, it increases salespersons’ performance-related motivations. Specifically, it promotes adaptive selling strategies, greater effort, and self-efficacy. Secondly, it positively affects organizational citizenship behaviors. Study 2 takes an emotion-process point of view and compares excessive pride (hubris) with positive pride. The results show that salespeople are capable of self-regulating the expression of these emotions via anticipated feelings of fear, shame, and regret. Salespeople in other words are affected by their emotions, but they also are capable of controlling them to their advantage.marketing;hubris;meta-emotions;organizational citizenship behaviors;pride;work motivation

When Intelligence is (Dys)Functional for Achieving Sales Performance

Using two different samples of salespeople, the authors investigate how a combination of general mental ability (GMA) and specific skills and capabilities (social competence and thinking styles) allows salespeople to reach their sales goals. The study finds evidence for an interaction between GMA and social competence. If combined with high social competence, high GMA leads to highest sales performance; if combined with low social competence, high GMA leads to lowest sales performance. In addition, interaction effects between GMA and a judicial thinking style were found. Salespeople high on GMA have the most potential for attaining high levels of sales performance when combined with specific skills; when lacking these skills they may become the firm’s worst performers.sales;knowledge;general mental ability;knowledge based marketing;thinking styles

How performance appraisals can encourage ethical behaviour

__Abstract__ All kinds of remedies have been suggested to minimise ethical problems in organisations, but recent research suggests that managers can significantly improve their employees' ethics simply by being fair and respectful for 30 minutes a year – provided they choose the right 30 minutes

Ethical Considerations and Change Recipients’ Reactions: ‘It’s Not All About Me’

An implicit assumption in most works on change recipient reactions is that employees are self-centred and driven by a utilitarian perspective. According to large parts of the organizational change literature, employees’ reactions to organizational change are mainly driven by observations around the question ‘what will happen to me?’ We analysed change recipients’ reactions to 26 large-scale planned change projects in a policing context on the basis of 23 in-depth interviews. Our data show that change recipients drew on observations with three foci (me, colleagues and organization) to assess change, making sense of change as multidimensional and mostly ambivalent in nature. In their assessment of organizational change, recipients care not only about their own personal outcomes, but go beyond self-interested concerns to show a genuine interest in the impact of change on their colleagues and organization. Meaningful engagement of employees in organizational change processes requires recognizing that reactions are not simply ‘all about me’. We add to the organizational change literature by introducing a behavioural ethics perspective on change recipients’ reactions highlighting an ethical orientation where moral motives that trigger change reactions get more attention than is common in the change management literature. Beyond the specifics of our study, we argue that the genuine concern of change recipients for the wellbeing of others, and the impact of the organizations’ activities on internal and external stakeholders, needs to be considered more systematically in research on organizational change

Combining Commerce and Culture

It seldom happens that new firms, new industries, and new business systems need to be developed simultaneously. This, however, is the situation in transition economies such as China. Irrespective of product and technology used, incentives and governance structures need to be formulated that give business endeavours an organisational form. The survivability of firms depends further on the ability to start and maintain long-term business relations between contracting parties, while only a broad consensus within the community of entrepreneurs and firms on the procedures that co-ordinate business relations and sanctions transgression promises a decline in transaction costs sufficiently enough to trigger off the quick expansion of markets

Exploring Emotional Competence: Its effects on coping, social capital, and performance of salespeople

We define emotional competence as a person’s domain-specific working model about how one can appropriately manage one’s emotions within interpersonal situations. Emotional competence is conceived as the integration of seven seemingly unrelated proficiencies: perspective taking, strategic self-presentation of emotions, helping targets of communication accept one’s genuine emotional reactions, lack of guilt when using emotions strategically, fostering self-authenticity, developing an ironic perspective, and incorporating one’s moral code into the self-regulation of emotions. A cluster analysis of responses to measures of the seven proficiencies by 220 salespeople revealed four distinct groups of people. The groups were defined by emotional competence syndromes consisting of combinations of different levels of the seven proficiencies. One group, the highly emotional competent, scored high on all seven proficiencies, a second group scored low on all seven. Two other groups resulted wherein one group was dominated by feelings of guilt in the use of emotions strategically, and the second was characterized by the inability to accept ambiguous and contradictory situations by assuming an ironic perspective. In a test of predictive validity, the highly emotional competent group, but not the others, coped effectively with envy and pride, achieved high social capital, and performed well

Coping with Sales Call Anxiety and Its Effects on Protective Actions

We study how salespeople cope with sales call anxiety and find that two tactics ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions in selling interactions. That is, situation modification and attentional deployment both moderate the effects of felt physiological sensations and anxiety on protective actions