FEEDBACK AS A SECONDARY REINFORCER IN INCENTIVE PROGRAMS TO INCREASE SALES

Utilization of feedback in an industrial setting has met with a great deal of success. Feedback has been used to increase employee productivity self-regulate employee behavior toward a desired goal and improve sales performance.;The subjects were 252 companies who bought Rheem air conditioning products from Gemaire Distributers Inc. All 252 companies were participating in an incentive travel program where they could travel free to Paris if they bought ;An extensive June advertising campaign by Rheem Air Conditioning Inc. coupled with an extremely hot month of June resulted in the single largest sales month in the history of Gemaire Inc. The effect of this record-breaking month of sales, which was also the study's final month of baseline, was to seemingly overshadow any treatment effected. If any possible implications can be drawn from these results it is from the non-significant trend that seems to suggest that less feedback leads to better performance and more feedback yield poorer performance. One possible explanation for these results is that the feedback was viewed as aversive thereby inhibiting performance. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.);Where feedback clearly is designed to be a discriminative stimulus for a desired behavior, then feedback may also be viewed as a conditioned reinforcer. It was the objective of this study to first establish feedback as a conditioned reinforcer in an industrial setting and then test two principles that apply to reinforcement theory. Specifically, this research examined whether increasing the frequency of conditioned reinforcement would increase sales productivity. Also, it attempted to test whether a more salient form of feedback would yield better sales performance.