Factors Affecting The Performance Of Sales Staff

How to improve the customer manager's job performance is an important issue for managers in the organizational context. However, reviewing the current literature, it is demonstrated that only very little research has examined this issue and in these studies, the authors have either investigated the individual factor or examined the situation factors, ignoring the interactive effects of the two factors. In sum, the previous research cannot solve the practical problem.Based on person-situation interactionalist perspective and trait activation theory, this thesis proposed that both individual factor and situation factors would influence job performance of customer managers and the two factors would have also interactive effect on their effects of job performance. Specifically, from the individual perspective, this thesis examined the role of customer manager's core self-evaluation on their job performance; from the situational perspective, examined the roles of customer manager's perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange and team-member exchange on their job performance. Furthermore, this thesis also discussed the interactive effects of core self-evaluation and perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange and team-member exchange, respectively.Using 243 customer managers of a commercial bank as research example, this thesis empirically examined the research questions. The results indicated that(1) Core self-evaluation had a significant positive effect on job performance;(2) customer manager's perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange and team-member exchange had positive effect on their job performance;(3) customer manager's perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange and team-member exchange moderated the association of core self-evaluation with job performance such that core self-evaluation would have more positive effect on job performance for customer manager when they receive more support from the organization, leader and coworker.In general, this thesis aimed to illustrate the determinants of customer manager's job performance from both the individual and the situational perspective. The findings concluded from this research have great practical implication to employee recruitment, training and performance management.There are several limitations in the thesis. First, all measures were collected at the same point, so that the thesis cannot generate the casual relationship between measures. Second, the sample size of this thesis was relatively small and all came from the same bank, so that the findings may not generalize to other contexts. Third, the job performance was evaluated by customer manager themselves, so that the findings may be misleading. Future research should solve these problems.