This is a study on relationship of salespersons' goal orientation, attribution, psychological responses, and behaviors following failure in sales performance, which aims to examine the attribution process due to failure in sales performance. In partic ...
This is a study on relationship of salespersons' goal orientation, attribution, psychological responses, and behaviors following failure in sales performance, which aims to examine the attribution process due to failure in sales performance. In particular, this study intends to suggest that there may be differences in helplessness and expectations for future success by ability and effort attributions which can be internal attributions in case of failure in sales performance and examine effects of both psychological responses on selling behaviors. Prior researches mention factors in salespersons' behaviors primarily in general selling situations but overlook their psychological responses and behaviors in the situation of failure in sales performance. However, an actual selling situation is where it is least likely that targeted performance will be achieved; therefore, it is necessary to investigate the process following failure in sales performance in such a situation. Failure arouses attribution caused by failure and the attribution then arouses psychological responses and affects even behaviors. Among attributions, internal attributions are closely related to psychological responses, which are very likely to affect behaviors later. Many companies recommend that salespersons should attribute any failure in sales performance to themselves and many mangers are actually attributing the failure to salespersons. This is because it is believed that failure is attributed to salespersons themselves, they will be more likely to make efforts to reflect their fault and solve problems. It is however necessary to throw a doubt on the belief of companies that such internal attributions all can arouse positive results. That is, all efforts and abilities, which can be internal attributions, don't lead to positive results; rather, they can arouse positive responses if they are considered as controllable by themselves and unstable, while they can possibly arouse negative responses if they are considered as uncontrollable and stable. It is therefore impossible to say that all efforts and abilities, or two typical elements of internal attributions, arouse positive responses.
As a result, salespersons' learning goal was found to increase effort attribution and to decrease ability attribution, but salespersons' performance goal was found to increase ability attribution. And ability attribution was found to increase helplessness and decrease expectations for future success while effort attribution was found to decrease helplessness and increase expectations for future success. Helplessness reduced prosocial behavior to customers while expectations for future success increased such behavior. This suggests that salespersons go through a process of causal search in case of failure in sales performance and that attribution of failure varies by what is salespersons' orientation goal, and psychological responses vary by what is considered to cause the failure, and psychological responses affect selling behaviors. In particular, all internal attributions do not cause positive results but some types of internal attribution can cause positive responses while other types can cause negative responses. Therefore, all salespersons who blame themselves are not positive; it is desirable for a company to induce positive attribution and avoid negative attribution in order to arouse positive responses continuously even in the situation of failure in sales performance.