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The purpose of the article is to present and test a model regarding important factors that may help reduce unethical behavior (i.e. misselling) of salespeople in the financial services industry.

To test the hypotheses, telemarketers from the life insurance industry in South Korea were surveyed (n=204).

Using structural equation modeling, the results indicate that: ethics training is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; ethical climate is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; selling pressure is unrelated to ethical attitude; competitive intensity is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; competitive intensity is unrelated to misselling; and misselling is inversely related to salesperson ethical attitude, positively associated with product complexity, and positively related to product variety.

Future empirical work could: investigate different variables from those utilized in this study; consider inter‐country and gender differences; use alternate sources of data to examine stability of the findings; and employ samples of firms in other industries and other marketing channels. Limitations include a limited number of study variables, use of solely the telemarketing channel for life insurance, a preponderance of female respondents, and potential for socially desirable responses.

Management should seek to maintain a high ethical attitude among sales agents to help foster a reduction in unethical behavior. Sales personnel should receive extensive ethics training to help enhance their ethical attitude in the job. Salespeople should also seek to establish and maintain long‐term relationships with their customers and to pursue long‐term profitability. Sales managers should seek to educate consumers about the various types of financial products, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and the appropriate conditions under which they should be purchased.

The potential for financial services industry salespeople to behave unethically has received extensive research attention. A key area, though, which has been virtually ignored is antecedents of misselling of financial services. The article seeks to address partially this gap in the literature.

According to a recent study, one of the ten most stressful occupations in the USA is that of a financial services salesperson. Severe job stress has been linked to decreased satisfaction, commitment and productivity, and increased absenteeism, burnout and turnover. Aims to test a model of job stress in the financial services profession, focussing on two central sources of stress: individual characteristics and organizational factors. Based on a sample of 288 stockbrokers in nine mid‐south metropolitan areas, finds that the major determinant of job stress is role overload. Recommends that managers impart better time management skills to salespeople, and hire highly competent sales assistants to handle much of the routine work. In order to reduce role conflict and role ambiguity, suggests that sales managers grant salespeople a high degree of autonomy and provide a high level of constructive feedback.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on agency theory (AT) to develop and validate a scale to investigate customers’ loyalty towards salespersons under agency problems. Especially with credence services, customer-salesperson relationships are beset by problems that stem from personal differences and conflicts of interests.

The context is financial investment services in Indonesia. Following Churchill’s (1979) procedure, initial qualitative surveys generated a pool of 44 items for the three AT asymmetries of risk, goal and information. Expert panel validation and exploratory factor analyses of a dataset (n = 429) confirmed a four-dimensional structure of 30 items. Finally, confirmatory factor analyses using a second dataset (n = 299) tested the effects of the four asymmetries on customer loyalty, and how the effects are moderated by customer trust and relationship duration.

Overall, agency problems negatively influence customer loyalty. Information asymmetry has two discriminantly distinct dimension, quality and timeliness. Low trust amplifies the effects of all asymmetries, whereas relationship duration reduces the effects of only risk asymmetry. Comparison with a three-factor model shows that the four-factor scale is superior.

Service firms desiring long-term customer relationships need to be cognisant of potential asymmetries created by salespersons, and develop initiatives to minimise potential fallouts from each asymmetry. These include proper alignment of compensation structures, accurate and timely communications of product information, and matching risk profiles between customers and salespersons. Regular customer feedback regarding perceived asymmetries would also help early problem detection. Finally, the findings would inform the development of policy matters and industry best practices.

Besides contributing to the small stream of research that applies AT to marketing, this study is the first to develop and validate an AT scale that incorporates all three asymmetries.

While the importance of salesperson market orientation behavior (SMOB) is widely acknowledged, as evidenced by the increasing research attention this concept is receiving, discussion of its antecedents and consequences in the literature remains limited. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the antecedents of SMOB and the underlying process through which it influences sales performance.

A causal model was developed to analyze the antecedents and consequences of SMOB. This proposed model and various hypotheses were tested using data obtained from a sample of 264 salespeople in the Taiwanese financial services industry.

The learning orientation and behavioral controls of salespeople positively influence SMOB. In addition, SMOB plays a critical role in improving two types of “working-smart” behaviors (i.e., sales planning and adaptive selling), thereby achieving better sales performance.

This report sheds light on the importance of SMOB in today’s personal sales environment and uncovers the underlying mechanisms through which SMOB contributes to sales performance. It also offers specific guidelines for the assessment and management of SMOB to enhance the performance of salespeople within the financial services industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why salespeople resist change and the impact of resistance to change on customer responsiveness and performance outcomes.

Survey responses derived from 233 salespeople from three large financial institutions in Mexico are used to test relationships involving salespersons’ resistance to change.

Salespeople are more likely to resist change if they believe that change increases their workload. They are less likely to resist change when they have higher levels of job autonomy and self‐efficacy. Resistance to change has a negative impact on customer responsiveness and salesperson's performance.

This study makes an important contribution to the literature by identifying factors that explain salesperson's resistance to change. Study findings rely on salesperson survey responses collected in one country and industry. Future research is needed to assess the generalizability of findings and causality of the proposed relationships.

Resistance to change affects the salespersons’ capacity to respond to customer demands and ultimately undermines performance. Managers can help reduce resistance to change by providing salespeople with greater job autonomy and by explaining how change affects their workload.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper linking salesperson resistance to change to job performance.

The study looks at how salesperson’s customer orientation (SCO) mediates the impact of a host of organisational, job-related and personality-related factors on salesperson performance. Previous studies that have considered the impact of customer orientation on performance have often considered a limited number of antecedent variables which has led to inconsistent results. The purpose of this paper is to address this concern by considering the multiple effects of several independent variables.

The conceptual model was tested through a large-scale survey of financial services salespersons in India. A total of 1,106 respondents participated in the survey. The data were analysed through structural equations modelling. Sobel’s test was employed to test the mediating effects.

The study found that customer orientation has a significant mediating effect in the case of several antecedent variables. The impact of variables like perceived supportive work environment, experienced meaningfulness, organisational identification, salesperson agreeableness and salesperson instability on salesperson performance is seen to be partially or fully mediated by SCO.

The cross-sectional design and the convenience sampling methodology are the main limitations of the study.

The study develops a more holistic, multipath model which can help managers as a guideline in recruiting and selecting salespersons. The importance of customer orientation points towards the need for better attitudinal training.

Theoretically, the paper highlights the need for developing more comprehensive models for considering the consequences of customer orientation and related issues. The multipath model addresses several calls for research on testing different antecedents of customer orientation as well as how customer orientation enhances salesperson performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations between salespeople’s empathy and listening behaviour and the relationship quality (RQ) customers have with their banks, taking into consideration the moderating effect of felt stress (FS) experienced by salespeople. The paper examines specific effects of FS on factors related to a salesperson’s performance.

To examine the proposed model, responses from 150 customers were collected and matched with responses from 25 salespeople working at a major ba ' nk in Chile. The paper analysed the dyadic data gathered using two analysis techniques. Structural equation modelling was employed to test the relationships proposed at the customer level. Moreover, hierarchical linear modelling was used to test the moderating effect of FS, measured at the salesperson level, on the proposed relationships.

The results show that customers’ perceptions of salespeople’s listening behaviour mediate the relationship between customers’ perception of salespeople’s empathy and RQ with the bank. Moreover, the positive relationship between salespeople’s empathy and salespeople’s listening behaviour, and the positive relationship between salesperson’s listening and customer’s RQ with bank are attenuated by the salesperson’s FS.

This paper examined the effects of the salesperson’s empathy and listening behaviour on the quality of customer relationships with the bank. Moreover, dyadic data show that such effects are influenced by variables related to the bank’s salespeople, such as FS. The findings show that under high FS conditions, salespeople with high listening skills will have negative effects on their customers’ RQ with the bank.

Salespeople’s unethical behaviors have been the subject of extensive academic research and practitioner outcry. High pressure, complex selling environments and extant methods of monitoring, control and compensation of salespeople have been found to lead to short-term sales behaviors, such as lying, that are detrimental to both customers and firms in the long run. Furthermore, work and family pressures can lead to unethical sales behaviors. However, research on the impact of the social environment on unethical behaviors in sales is scant. This study aims to examine the impact of social factors (e.g. supervisor support and family work support) on salespeople’s unethical behaviors as a social exchange process in an emerging market context where work and family pressures are high. Specifically, the mediating role of emotional and cognitive engagement on the relationship between social support and unethical behaviors is investigated.

An empirical study was conducted to examine the relationship between social support (family work support and supervisor support), engagement (emotional and cognitive) and unethical behaviors. Survey data were collected from 496 salespeople from multiple industries in India, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships. In addition, post hoc qualitative interviews were conducted with 15 salespeople to corroborate the findings.

Supervisor support is positively related to emotional and cognitive engagement and negatively related to unethical behaviors. Contrary to our hypothesis, family work support is positively related to unethical behaviors. However, this relationship becomes negative when the salesperson is emotionally and cognitively engaged with their work.

This research enhances the understanding of the antecedents of unethical behaviors in sales. Supervisor support, emotional engagement and cognitive engagement reduce unethical behaviors. However, family work support increases unethical behaviors. The relationship between social support (supervisor and family work) and unethical behaviors is mediated by emotional and cognitive engagement. These findings offer sales managers dealing with increasing work and family pressures and the blurring of personal and professional life a way to motivate their sales force to act in a manner that benefits customers and the firm in the long run.

The findings offer insights on how sales managers and organizations can help design supportive work environments for their salespeople to help reduce unethical behaviors. The findings also highlight the importance of understanding salesperson family values during the hiring process and keeping salespeople engaged, especially while they work from home, are isolated from their work environment and spend more working hours at home with family members.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current research is the first to investigate the impact of family work support on unethical behaviors. This is timely and valuable as the current COVID-19 pandemic has increased the number of salespeople working from home, reduced sales performance and increased anxiety due to economic uncertainty, all of which could encourage unethical sales behaviors. This paper is also the first to investigate the mediating role of engagement on the effects of social support on unethical behaviors.

Reports that concern with selection of high‐performing salespeople has a long pedigree, but the results of research have not been encouraging. Test one composite instrument, the Caliper Profile, on a sample of 90 salespeople employed by a company in the financial services sector. After comparing the predictions of the instrument against the records, it was concluded that there was some consistency between how line managers in that company appraised the sample and the Caliper predictions. There was, however, little relationship between the salespeople quantified performance against agreed sales targets and the predictions of that instrument. Thus Caliper predicted better the managers’ assessment of overall performance. Advances a number of methodological considerations are advanced with a view to exploring the subject further.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of analytical customer relationship management (CRM) on salesperson information use behavior.

To achieve the aim of this paper, a vignette experiment was undertaken. The data used for the final analysis included 125 professional salespeople across multiple industries.

This paper focuses on the personal use of competitive intelligence. The authors find that to maximize the effectiveness of using competitive intelligence, the salesperson must become adept at both choosing the correct pa`rtners to trust and properly valuing information. Properly valuing information can be accomplished through the use of analytical CRM.

The managerial implications of this paper are straightforward yet important. CRM providers have improved the tools available to salespeople (e.g., heat maps) and have partnered with other large scale providers of customer and market information (e.g., global marketing research firms) to provide a analytical tool that is user friendly to salespeople. Yet, many firms still use simplified CRM platforms, which do little more for the salesperson than offer an opportunity to document notes. Sales firms should move toward this analytical CRM system because it improves the salesperson’s ability to value information and increases the salesperson’s ability to use intelligence to link products to buyer needs.

This paper contributes to theory through confirming the importance of analytical CRM on salesperson’s information use behavior by using a motivation, opportunity and ability framework. Additionally, a methodological contribution was made through the development of an information value scale.