Salesperson’s spirituality: impact on customer orientation and adaptability

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to use the perspective of ego to investigate the spirituality of a salesperson and its influence on customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior. Meaningful work is proposed as a mediator.

Design/methodology/approach

Cross-sectional data were collected from 218 insurance salespeople in India. Bootstrap with SEM was used to test mediation.

Findings

The paper finds that there is full mediation through meaningful work on both the outcome behaviors.

Research limitations/implications

The findings will encourage researchers to link various salesperson outcomes such as ethical sales behavior, salesperson service behavior, and so on to spirituality.

Practical implications

The findings can provide some relevant inputs for sales leadership actions aimed at facilitating employees’ spiritual experiences.

Originality/value

This is among the first few studies, as what the authors believe, in the sales literature to find out that spirituality and sales job not only can co-exist, but they do complement each other.

Citation

Chawla, V. and Guda, S. (2017), "Salesperson’s spirituality: impact on customer orientation and adaptability", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 408-424. https://doi.org/10.1108/MIP-06-2016-0087