Assessment of Salespeople: Personality, Competency or Attitude?

Aylin DincerLevent Sevinç

ECPA12 European Conference on Psychology Assessment, San Sebastian 2013

IntroductionIntroduction

• In the last two decades, the interest in the use of personality in predicting sales performance increased after emergence of Big Five model (Stevens & Macintosh, 2002).– However even with the Big Five model the effect of

personality on sales performance varies from low to modest (Sitser, Linden & Born, 2013).

• Thus, it is important to improve the predictive validity of salespeople assessment both for theory and practice.

Personality and Sales Personality and Sales Performance Performance

• Research and meta-analyses indicated that two personality dimensions among the Big Five personality factors, Conscientiousness and Extraversion are particularly important in predicting performance in sales. – As for sales performance Conscientiousness has the

highest predictive validity. (Vinchur et al., 1998; Barrick & Mount, 1991; Salgado, 1997; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000)

Personality and Sales Personality and Sales Performance Performance

• Agreeableness and Emotional Stability showed only minor relation or no relation at all to sales performance (Vinchur et al., 1998). – Recent research reported significant relation of

Emotional Stability to sales performance (Wisker, 2012).

• Openness was found as a significant predictor of gaining high numbers of new customers rather than sales volume (Furnham & Fudge, 2008).

Big Five: Broad or Narrow?Big Five: Broad or Narrow?

• Big Five have been found too wide for use in personnel assessment by some researchers.

• There may be some specific personality characteristics that may be important in particular jobs (Hogan & Roberts, 1996). – Potency (subfactor of Extraversion) and Achievement

(subfactor of Conscientiousness) subdimensions of the Big Five were the strongest predictors of sales success. (Vinchur et al., 1998)

– Optimism (subfactor of Emotional Stability) leads to high sales performance through increasing sales effort (Dixon and Schertzer, 2005).

Big Five: Broad or Narrow?Big Five: Broad or Narrow?

• Compatible with this argument, some researchers reported that narrow personality constructs provide incremental validity (Conte & Jacobs, 2003; Crant, 1995) – Thus, assessment of these constructs increase

predictive validity when it comes to selecting personnel (Morgesin et al., 2007; Murphy & Dzieweczynski, 2005).

• For selecting sales employees, narrow traits should be considered for assessment instead of broader Big Five factors (Sitser, Linden, Born, 2013).

Other Than Big FiveOther Than Big Five

• To improve the predictive validity of sales assessment, two different constructs may be used other than big five.

• Attitude towards sales profession may be seen as an important one for this purpose.– For sales profession, especially personal selling,

negative perceptions are likely because this occupation has been stereotyped with a negative image.

– Thus, if one is not attracted to sales profession, even his/her personality is suitable for the job, he/she may fail to perform well.

Other Than Big FiveOther Than Big Five

• Another construct may be competencies which are used widespread in salespeople recruitment, as well as in all human resources management (HRM) in practice.– Spencer and Spencer (1993) defined sales

competencies related with superior performance (such as influence, customer orientation, communication skills) which are commonly accepted and used by HR professionals and yet not covered by personality.

AimAim

• To this end, this study aims to identify which of those characteristics (personality, competencies and attitude towards sales profession) explain success of sales people.

METHOD

MethodMethod

• Research was conducted on salespeople of an insurance company (n=140).– The survey was distributed online to all of the

salespeople (N=188) working in the Marmara region of the insurance company. 140 valid replies obtained, yielding a 74.4 percent response rate.

MethodMethod

• The participants were divided into two groups according to their sales performance.– Company evaluates performance by individual target

actualization percentages according to sales volumes on monthly base.

– Performance over 80% is considered to be successful while below 80% are considered unsuccessful. Accordingly, participants were divided into two groups (successful ones, n=50; and unsuccessful ones n=90) regarding previous 6 months’ performance data.

MeasureMeasure

• Personality traits, competencies and attitude toward sales profession were measured by SALECOM Sales Competencies Inventory developed by Assessment Systems. – The inventory consists of 75 items to which

participants respond using a 5-point Likert scale (5=strongly agree, 1=strongly disagree).

• «When I fail, I inquire the reasons of my failure.»• «While persuading someone, I make use of the elements that

will be attractive for him/her.»• «I perceive sales as a profession.»

MeasureMeasure

• SALECOM consists of 10 dimensions which can be categorized in three parts as personality traits, competencies and attitude toward sales profession. – Personality dimensions (5): achievement orientation

(C), self-confidence (C), optimism (N), social anxiety (N), sociability (E)

– Competency dimensions (4): communication skills, influence, customer orientation, networking

– Attitude toward sales profession (1)

MeasureMeasure

• Factor Analysis revealed that the scale consists of 10 dimensions.– KMO=.86; Bartlett’s Test chi square 576.36

p=.00<.01; total variance explained=60%

• The Cronbach’s Alpha values calculated for each dimension indicate that the scale has high internal consistency. – Ranges from .82 to .88

Participants Participants

• The distribution of the participants (140) in terms of their demographic characteristics is as follows:– 81% university graduate– 55% males– 56% between ages of 25 to 29

• The distribution of each group in terms of their demographic characteristics is similar.

RESULTS

ResultsResults

• Discriminant analysis was conducted to identify the characteristics that differ between groups.

• Results indicated a significant function (p < .05) providing a canonical correlation of .40. – Eigenvalue=.19; Wilks’ Lambda=.84– Chi-Square=23.40, df=10

ResultsResults

• Analysis of the structure matrix revealed six significant predictors.

The cross validated classification showed that overall 69.3% were correctly classified

ResultsResults

• 3 out of 5 personality traits and 2 out of 4 competencies were significant. – Attitude towards sales profession had the second

highest score among all dimensions. – Competencies had the least scores.

Personality Traits Competencies Attitude

Achievement orientation*

Customer orientation*Attitude toward sales

profession*

Optimism* Communication skills*

Self-confidence* Influence

Social anxiety Networking

Sociability

* Significant predictors (p<.05)

ResultsResults

• Discriminant analysis was conducted for each dimension group in order to determine their contributions to canonical correlation separately. – Personality traits and attitude towards sales profession

significantly predicted the success. On the other hand competencies did not.

Dimension Groups Canonical Correlation Sig.

Personality .36 .02*

Attitude .28 .01*

Competency .20 .24

* p<.05

ResultsResults

• In order to determine the incremental contributions of attitude and competencies to personality, several analyses conducted for each of them respectively. – Solely personality had a canonical correlation of .36.

Attitude towards sales profession contributed .03 to this ratio, while competencies added .01.

Dimension GroupsCanonical

CorrelationΔ

Personality .36

Personality + Attitude .39 .03

Personality + Attitude + Competency

.40 .01

CONCLUSION

ConclusionConclusion

• In congruence with other research (Vinchur et al., 1998; Barrick & Mount, 1991) Achievement and Self-Confidence (subfactors of Conscientiousness) had significant relation with sales performance. Also Achievement was the strongest among all dimensions.– In terms of subfactors of Emotional Stability, while

Optimism was a significant predictor, Social Anxiety was not. There is rare evidence for Emotional Stability to predict sales performance.

– Sociability as the only subfactor of Extraversion was not a significant predictor. Other findings emphasizes Potency subfactor of Extraversion which was not examined in this study.

ConclusionConclusion

• According to the results related to personality dimensions, it can be said that practitioners should consider narrow personality traits for selecting sales employees instead of broad Big Five factors.

• But also factors other than Big Five should be considered.– Attitude towards sales profession was a significant

predictor of sales success, and it was the second strongest one after Achievement.

– Although competencies solely did not differentiate the successful ones from the others, they increased the overall variance with personality and attitude.

ConclusionConclusion

• Briefly, results indicate that assessing salespeople by not using only personality traits or competencies (as it is in practice) but using both of them and also taking attitude toward profession into consideration will provide better results and enable more accurate recruitment. – Especially attitude towards sales profession can be

considered as an important construct to improve the predictive validity.

SuggestionsSuggestions

• It might be expected that other dimensions had significance, but they did not. – This may be explained by the method that we used in

differentiating the successful salespeople from the others. Thus, since both groups might have similar scores at those dimensions, they did not make any differentiation among the groups.

– Or direct selling profession may require different dimensions other than examined in this study. Thus, further research may focus on different sales positions or use larger samples to identify this.

Thank you!