Abstract
Selling products and services is a central function in organizations. Although explaining sales success has mainly been approached from broad trait perspectives, tactical decision-making potentially explains additional variance in this crucial outcome. We propose and find that promotion focus positively predicts sales agents’ success, while prevention focus negatively predicts sales success. These relations were significant while controlling for five-factor traits. Predictors were measured before participants started on the job; outcome was the total number of sales participants made. As such, results evidence incremental validity of regulatory focus in predicting objective sales performance.
References
1998). Personality and job performance: The importance of narrow traits. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 19, 289–303.
(2012). A meta-analysis of the regulatory focus nomological network: Work-related antecedents and consequences. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80, 160–172.
(2014). Statistical mediation analysis with a multicategorical independent variable. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 67, 451–470.
(1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American Psychologist, 52, 1280–1300.
(2001). Achievement orientations from subjective histories of success: Promotion pride versus prevention pride. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 3–23.
(2012). Regulatory focus and work-related outcomes: A review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 998–1034.
(1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 81–90.
(1999). Brief bipolar markers for the Five Factor Model of personality. Psychological Reports, 84, 1173–1179.
(2011). Promotion and prevention systems: Regulatory focus dynamics within self-regulatory hierarchies. In K. D. VohsR. F. BaumeisterEds., Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (pp. 143–161). New York, NY: Guilford.
(2005). Linguistic signatures of regulatory focus: How abstraction fits promotion more than prevention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 36–45.
(1998). A meta-analytic review of predictors of job performance for salespeople. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 586–597.
(