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The impact of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance has received initial support in literature in recent years. However, no studies have explored if this impact should vary according to the career stage that the employee is in. If an interaction effect exists, then managers should expect different results when coaching people in different stages of their careers. Otherwise, all employees (independently of their career stage) can benefit from the positive impact of coaching and, thus, the manager can expect a continuous positive outcome on employee performance throughout their careers. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the moderation effect of an employee’s career stage on the relationship between managerial coaching and performance.

A sample of 318 financial advisors from two Canadian banks was used to collect data on the amount, and quality, of managerial coaching received by the employees, as well as their performance. multigroup confirmatory factor analysis ran in AMOS was used to test the moderation effect of experience.

Results confirmed the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee behavioral and sales performance, but no moderation effect was found. The measuring and causal models showed invariance for employees in their early (one to seven years of selling experience), middle (8-15 years), and late (more than 15 years) career stages, suggesting that managerial coaching will make a consistent contribution to performance throughout all the stages of the employee’s career.

The study makes two main contributions to the scientific literature. First, it offers an original study examining the effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector. Second, it examines the role of selling experience as a moderator in coaching processes, thus contributing to the limited literature on career stages.

The study suggests that managers should equally devote their coaching efforts to all employees, independently of their selling experience. Contrary to the belief that rookies will benefit more from coaching, and that “you cannot teach an old dog new tricks,” results suggest that managerial coaching makes a continuous contribution to performance throughout all the stages of an employee’s career.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderation effect of selling experience on coaching consequences, and one of the few to present evidence of the positive effect of managerial coaching on frontline employee performance in the banking sector.

The purpose of the study is to test the effect of relationship managerial behavior (i.e. managerial coaching) on frontline employee performance (i.e. sales performance) and the mediating effect of employee's relationship behaviors (i.e. customer orientation and adaptive selling) in a Chinese banking environment.

Data were collected using a survey from 242 frontline employees working at a large commercial bank in Dalian (China). Measures on managerial coaching, customer orientation, adaptive selling and sales performance were adapted from the literature. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS 26.

Results indicate that (1) managerial coaching positively affects employee customer orientation, (2) employee customer orientation positively affects employee adaptive selling behavior and (3) adaptive selling behavior positively affects sales performance. Bootstrap analysis confirmed the significance and stability of all the direct paths (suggesting that every mediator fully mediates the effect of its antecedent on the criterion) but none of the indirect paths found support (full mediation model).

The study makes a contribution to the nomological network of managerial coaching by introducing a construct that has not been used previously (i.e. employee adaptive selling behavior) and testing its relevance in a commercial setting.

The results suggest that (1) managerial coaching is a central managerial behavior for companies that would like to implement a relationship marketing strategy because it helps promote specific employee relationship behaviors like customer orientation and adaptive selling, (2) there seems to be little cultural differences in the banking industry between the Chinese and the Western banks, suggesting that coaching and other management tools can be transferable from one culture to the other and (3) that coaching is an effective tool to help employees achieve higher sales performance.

The paper contributes to the literature on the use of managerial coaching in commercial areas to increase frontline employee relationships behaviors. The identification of adaptive selling as a mediator is an original contribution because it has received little attention in scientific research. Additionally, the use of a Chinese sample of bank employees responds to recent call for more research in cross-cultural settings.

The purpose of this paper is to test the influence of managerial coaching on frontline employee customer orientation, sales orientation and performance in a Chinese context. Further to this first goal, the authors also aim to compare these results with those obtained with a sample of Canadian bank employees in order to understand to what extent differences between Eastern and Western cultures affect business practices and employee responses in both environments.

This paper replicates a study from 2014 that used a sample of Canadian financial advisors to test the impact of managerial coaching on customer orientation, sales orientation and performance. In this new study, 185 frontline employees from a large insurance company in Chongqing (China) answered a paper-and-pencil questionnaire in Mandarin providing information about the coaching received from their managers, their own customer and sales orientation, as well as performance. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS as well as multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate cross-cultural differences.

The authors found that for the Chinese respondents managerial coaching is positively related to employee performance both directly and through the mediation effect of customer orientation. The authors found no support for the mediation of sales orientation between coaching and performance. These results suggest that managerial coaching might be a good strategy to promote relational behaviors in frontline employees, but not to reduce manipulative behaviors. The authors also found that these results are statistically equivalent for Chinese and Canadian respondents, suggesting that cultural differences are less prevalent than expected in this business sector.

The study makes several contributions to research. First, it suggests that managerial coaching can help employees develop their customer orientation–a central construct for commercial organizations working under a relational marketing approach. Second, it presents one of the first studies that evaluate the efficiency of managerial coaching in an Eastern country. And finally, results underline the equivalence of results for Eastern (China) and Western (Canada) respondents suggesting that in a global environment (like the financial industry) the business logic guiding the development of good customer relationships and employee customer-oriented behaviors prevails over potential cultural differences and makes leader and employee behaviors more similar and comparable across different regions in the world.

First, the use of managerial coaching seems to increase frontline employee relational behaviors, like customer orientation. Accordingly, managerial coaching seems to be a link that can help financial institutions bridge the formulation of a marketing relational strategy in the boardroom and the implementation of such a strategy at the customer interface between frontline employees and customers. Second, given the equivalence of results between the Canadian and the Chinese sample, it seems that the similarities between business models and business logics within the financial services sector are more important—and supersede—the potential cross-cultural differences between Eastern and Western countries.

The study makes a contribution to the limited literature on the use of managerial coaching in financial institutions to increase frontline employee relational behaviors. At the same time, it presents one of the few cross-cultural studies comparing results obtained from Chinese and Canadian respondents.

The purpose of the paper is to validate if managers (through the use of managerial coaching) can help subordinates develop implementation intentions to address difficult problems and situations with customers. These implementation intentions take the form of new task strategies and go beyond the automated mechanisms of providing more effort, persisting longer in the pursuit of goals or adapting old strategies to solve new problems.

We designed a cross-sectional field study with a convenience sample of 184 salespeople from different companies. Respondents provided information concerning the coaching received from their supervisors, the degree to which they were able to develop implementation intentions in future encounters with customers, and sales performance. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS.

We found that coaching can help salespeople develop better implementation intentions and, thus, be more effective in their interactions with customers, ultimately increasing their sales performance.

The paper explores the use of coaching to help subordinates develop new task-oriented strategies, using two theoretical frameworks: implementation intentions and goal-setting.

Social cognitive career theory (“SCCT”) suggests that positive feedback can influence educational choices. Introductory courses often provide students with their first opportunity to obtain feedback in a given discipline. As a result, SCCT hypothesizes that introductory courses grades will impact a student's decision to major in a given discipline. The purpose of this paper is to explore this hypothesis in the accounting domain.

Longitudinal data were collected from four cohorts of students registered at a Canadian university. The main hypothesis is tested by estimating a logistic regression.

A significant positive relationship is found between a student's introductory financial accounting (“IFA”) course grade and their decision to major in accounting. This decision to major in the discipline is not found to be affected by various student (e.g. biological sex or age) or instructor (e.g. whether the instructor holds a CPA designation or not) characteristics.

This study supports seminal and enduring research that emphasizes the IFA course as a gateway into the accounting major. As a result, educators should consider these findings when designing their IFA courses and the related student supports embedded within the IFA course.

Prior literature offers conflicting results on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting. This study relies upon a theoretical framework, SCCT, to settle the debate. This study further extends the prior literature by exploring the impact of various student and instructor characteristics on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent bank manager's coaching, a managerial relationship behavior based on mutual trust, openness and quality of exchanges, affects front-line employee's performance through the mediating effect of salesperson's customer orientation.

The paper conducted a non-experimental, cross-sectional study; a Canadian bank agreed to participate in the study and 122 financial advisors with sales responsibilities answered a web-based survey; data were analyzed using structural equation modelling.

The paper found support for the hypotheses that managerial coaching behavior can help bank employees develop their customer orientation and increase their performance, as well as reduce opportunistic behavior (sales orientation). The paper found that the direct link between coaching and performance, plus the mediating effect of sales orientation and customer orientation (SOCO) can potentially explain a significant variation in employee's performance (r2=0.23). The paper also found that the hypothesized model provided better explanations of the phenomenon when compared with two rival models, one considering SOCO as a full mediator between coaching and performance, and the other one considering only the effect of coaching on performance.

In the banking sector, practitioners and scholars are paying increased attention to the role of trust and relationship behaviors in the development of market orientation and customer relationships. The paper identified a key relationship behavior (customer orientation) and tests its impact as a mediator between a relationship managerial behavior (coaching) and business outcomes (performance) in an international banking setting (Canada).

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of how brand-specific transformational leadership (TFL) and transactional leadership (TRL) enhance employee-based brand equity (EBBE) by influencing employees’ perceived brand value congruence (EPBVC).

This study employed hierarchical linear modeling and chose moderating variables that are primarily related to the working environment: person–job fit (PJF) and person–group fit (PGF). The sample included managers and employees of the largest domestic bank in Taiwan.

Questionnaires were distributed to banking staff in the service industry. The results imply that both brand-specific TFL and brand-specific TRL require the mediation of PJF and PGF to influence EBBE, which then influences brand equity. Without these mediators, brand-specific TFL and brand-specific TRL have no effects on EBBE.

Compared to the results from other studies, these results imply a unique discovery that both brand-specific TFL and brand-specific TRL require the mediation of PJF and PGF to influence EPBVC, which in turn influences EBBE. Without these mediators, brand-specific TFL and brand-specific TRL do not have any effects.