The relationship of salesperson coachability, trait competitiveness, and leadership style on salesperson performance: An interactionist perspective

This study introduces the concept of salesperson coachability to the sales literature. Grounded in interactional psychology, the concept of coachability was adapted and applied to salespeople and tested in a sales setting to determine its effects on salesperson performance. Assessing salesperson coachability may help sales managers to make recruiting decisions, to make more effective recommendations to their existing salespeople regarding ways to enhance their interpersonal relationships, and to better predict salesperson performance.;This study conceptualized, proposed, and tested relationships among salesperson coachability, salesperson trait competitiveness, and salesperson performance in the context of two sales manager leadership styles. A reliable and valid measure of athlete coachability was adapted to assess salesperson coachability in a sales context. It was expected that salesperson performance would be highest when salespeople are highly coachable, highly competitive, and under transformational leadership. This conceptualization of how the three independent variables interact to affect the dependent variable of salesperson performance is consistent with the effect congruence pattern. In other words, the present study attempts to demonstrate that high levels of all examined independent variables are preferable and positively related to high levels of salesperson performance.;Hypotheses were tested using cross sectional survey data collected from both large and small organizations from the Health Care-Pharmaceutical industry in the United States. With a response rate of 56%, responses from 270 salespeople were used for hypothesis testing in this study. The study's adopted and adapted multi-item measures were subjected to a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to address issues of dimensionality, convergent, and discriminant validity. Hypothesized direct and moderating effects were tested using structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression resulting in general support for three out live hypotheses.;Given the ability to measure for the interactional personality variable of coachability, a shift in emphasis with respect to responsibility for salesperson performance may be in order. Extant research tends to give sales managers credit for salesperson performance and to hold managers responsible for salesperson failure. This study challenges this perspective and suggests that the salesperson is at least as responsible for their performance as is the sales manager.