Evaluation of Salesforce Contest Performance

Abstract

This study reports the types of salesforce characteristics and sales contest planning policies associated with success of salesforce contests. Three measures of contest success are used: attainment of contest objectives, contest's contribution to profit, and the number of negative side effects generated by the contest.     

Seeing What We Know, Knowing What We See: Challenging the Limits of Visual Acuity

Ageism has resulted in overstated expectations regarding the inevitable deterioration in human capabilities, such as visual perception, with age (Rowe and Kahn in Science, 237, 143?C149, 1987; Grant in Health and Social Work, 21, 9?C15, 1996). Human visual perception, however, is of a largely constructive nature, evidenced in the complementary interactions between top-down inputs (e.g., expectations) and bottom-up stimuli (Engel et al. in National Review of Neuroscience, 2(10), 704?C716, 2001; Miller and Cohen in, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202, 2001). Based on this constructive nature, we hypothesized that visual perception may be better than is typically expected. In three experiments, we demonstrated the malleability of visual acuity using a conditioning procedure involving manipulations in bottom-up stimuli. Experimental groups read a book excerpt with one letter in decreased font size, while the control groups read the same book excerpt with all letters in the same font size. Experiment 1 (N?=?112) examined whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a specific letter. Experiment 2 (N?=?70) assessed whether visual acuity could be enhanced for a non-conditioned letter, while Experiment 3 (N?=?108) evaluated whether the visual conditioning effects would transfer to all non-conditioned letters. Visual acuity for experimental groups was significantly better than that in the control groups, speaking to the general malleability of our visual sense.     

The impact of sales contests on customer listening: an empirical study in a telesales context

Companies often use sales contests to achieve short-term objectives to motivate salespeople and to boost sales. However, sales contests also may encourage salespeople to adopt less relational behaviors and limit their ability to manage customer relationships, as manifested in their customer listening practices. Therefore, this study, based on a natural field experiment, examines the effects of a sales contest on customer listening. In so doing, four dimensions of customer listening (passive, active, adaptive, and assertive listening), associated with a process of listening (Hearing, Processing, and Responding), were identified. The study helps clarify the effect of a sales contest on these four dimensions of customer listening by telesales agents. The results reveal that this sales contest exerts negative effects only on the active and passive customer listening, not on the adaptive and assertive customer listening. The study sheds light on how sales contests influence important behaviors such as customer listening, as well as on the nature of customer listening itself.     

Immigration Law and Its Impact on the Family: What Group Therapists Need to Know

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of structural limitations and challenges imposed by U.S. immigration law and enforcement policies and how they specifically impact families. Our analysis draws from numerous years of experience practicing immigration law and analysis of social and legal factors that impact immigrant individuals and families. We provide historical context for the Trump administration policies that have generated so much debate, reviewing how U.S. immigration creates barriers to family unity and stress on immigrant individuals and families, and explaining how the current administration has exacerbated these problems. We aim to help group psychotherapists gain greater awareness of their immigrant patients’ experiences through an analysis of immigration law and the use of case studies.     

Long Working Hours and Well-being: What We Know,What We Do Not Know,and What We Need to Know

Despite a widespread belief in both the academic and public policy literatures that working long hours is deleterious to health and well-being, our critical review of this large and complex literature fails to support a robust direct causal effect of work hours on either physical or mental well-being outcomes. Large-scale epidemiological studies, many of which are prospective and include objective health outcome measures, support a statistically significant association between long work hours and coronary heart disease and depression, but the effect sizes are very small. Moreover, there is an absence of true longitudinal studies that assess the consistency of working long hours over time and its relationship to well-being. Our review suggests that the effects of working long hours are nuanced in that they may vary considerably for different working populations based on gender, age, working conditions, and other factors. Primary and meta-analytic studies suggest that such moderator effects are plausible, yet rigorous testing of these remains to be done. We conclude with suggestions for specific moderator effects that seem worth investigating in future research.     

Important First-line Sales Management Qualifications: What Sales Executives Think

Abstract

What personal characteristics and performance dimensions are important in determining who is promoted to first-line sales management positions? This question concerns those who aspire to sales management positions, as well as managers who are involved in the first-line sales management process. Despite the significance of the topic, virtually no published research has examined this issue. This paper reports the results of a nationwide survey of senior-level sales executives that focused on criteria that are important in the selection of first-line managers.     

How to Retain Real Estate Sales People: What Things Work

Abstract

This study examines the residential real estate salesperson as one population and the real estate sales manager as a second population in an effort to identify those rewards important to successful sales and career development, as well as retention. Indepth interviews were conducted in order to provide more reliable results for this career field. It was determined that the management of real estate salespeople can be improved by focusing upon selection procedures as well as by developing a greater identification of the salesperson with the firm.     

Evaluation of Selling Performance: A Study of Current Practices

Abstract

Performance evaluation of salespeople is particularly important in this era of escalating costs and concern with productivity. This study of 213 sales executives indicated that sales managers tended to rely on qualitative bases for evaluation, used only a narrow set of quantitative bases, and evaluated salespeople over only a narrow range of selling activities. Suggestions for improving performance evaluation are provided. Findings of the study indicate that salesforce evaluation procedures utilized in practice differ from those provided in the sales management literature.     

Psychotherapy With African American Men: What We Know and What We Need to Know

African American men are at an increasingly high risk of experiencing psychological disturbances. Strategies for establishing effective therapeutic relationships with these clients are provided in the literature. Notably absent are empirical data pertaining to the effectiveness of psychotherapy with African American men. This article reviews the literature on psychotherapy and proposes an agenda for the next decade of research with African American male clients.     

The Predictive Validity of Ideal Partner Preferences in Relationship Formation: What We Know,What We Don't Know,and Why It Matters

A great deal of research on interpersonal attraction implicitly assumes that stated ideal partner preferences guide the mate selection, and therefore relationship formation, process. Nevertheless, recent research has yielded contradictory results. Whereas some research has failed to demonstrate that ideal partner preferences influence attraction to actual potential romantic partners, other studies have provided empirical evidence for the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences following interactions with potential romantic partners. A new meta‐analysis on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences concluded that people may not preferentially pursue potential partners that more closely match their stated preferences. This conclusion has significant implications for several empirical literatures that have relied on self‐reported ideal partner preferences to test hypotheses. We demonstrate, however, that the majority of the research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences, and thus research included in this meta‐analysis, focuses on interpersonal attraction or later relationship processes and not on individuals transitioning into actual new relationships. We suggest that research that directly focuses on the transition into actual relationships is needed before firm conclusions can be made regarding the predictive validity of ideal partner preferences in the formation of new relationships.     

It is all in good humor? Examining the impact of salesperson evaluations of leader humor on salesperson job satisfaction and job stress

Abstract

Salesperson job stress and job satisfaction have been identified as critical factors affecting job performance. Academic research suggests that sales managers can influence salesperson job stress and job satisfaction. Interestingly, a review of the sales literature finds very little research on the impact of sales leader humor usage on the stress and satisfaction of salespeople. Consequently, we explore how salespeople’s evaluation of their manager’s use of humor influences their individual levels of job stress and satisfaction. We investigate both the positive and negative roles of humor by analyzing the impact of salesperson evaluations of their managers’ use of affiliative and aggressive humor on their job stress and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we examine the mechanism by which these evaluations affect salesperson stress and satisfaction by identifying two critical mediating variables – social loneliness and willingness to cooperate. Using a sample of 299 professional salespeople, we empirically test this process model to find that affiliative humor usage by sales managers, as evaluated by salespeople, reduces social loneliness and stress for salespeople while also increasing followers’ acceptance of cooperation. Evaluations of aggressive humor, on the other hand, increase stress levels among salespeople. Both social loneliness and acceptance of cooperation, in turn, significantly affect job satisfaction.     

Character Strengths Interventions: Building on What We Know for Improved Outcomes

For this review strengths intervention studies were located using online searches and collegial networks and included if they explicitly sought to teach or use a strengths classification to enhance well-being, and used pre- and post-intervention measures and a comparison group. Eight studies met the criteria and have been summarised by this review. To date, the effect sizes achieved by character strengths interventions have been small to moderate. An understanding of how these interventions work may facilitate development of more effective interventions, while expanding the field of character strengths interventions to include a broader range of activities and approaches may also offer benefits. Research examining individual factors, such as strengths use, psychological need satisfaction, goal-setting and goal-striving provides promising leads to explain how strengths interventions work. However, the effect on intervention efficacy of relational or contextual factors, such as intervention environment or facilitator attitude to strengths, has not yet been explored. Implications for interventions in school settings are considered.     

Living Danger: On Not Knowing What We Know

This paper contextualizes the struggle around the American Psychological Association's ethical standards regarding psychologists' participation in abusive interrogations of detainees by examining the psychological and political meanings of living in a society in which the state assumes the right to torture. To highlight the implications of authoritarian trends in America's post-9/11 political culture, I offer an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic analysis of the extreme social situation of the Argentine Dirty War, in which torture was used by the military government not as a tactic to make detainees talk but as a strategy to silence an entire population. I explore the defense mechanism of disavowal and its use by both perpetrators and victims in ways that contributed to sustaining authoritarian rule in Argentina. I suggest that it is within the legitimate arena of psychoanalysis to consider the psychological meanings of patients' experience in the larger social order. I argue for a psychoanalytic project that does not disavow the centrality of social reality in the formation of subjectivity and for a clinical model that provides a potential space in which the subject can develop a critical psyche able to co-construct a more democratic political as well as personal life.     

COVID in NYC: What We Could Do Better

Abstract

New York City hospitals expanded resources to an unprecedented extent in response to the COVID pandemic. Thousands of beds, ICU beds, staff members, and ventilators were rapidly incorporated into hospital systems. Nonetheless, this historic public health disaster still created scarcities and the need for formal crisis standards of care. These were not available to NY clinicians because of the state’s failure to implement, with or without revision, long-standing guidance documents intended for just such a pandemic. The authors argue that public health plans for disasters should be well-funded and based on available research and expertise. Communities should insist that political representatives demonstrate responsible leadership by implementing and updating as needed, crisis standards of care. Finally, surge requirements should address the needs of both those expected to survive and those who will not, by expanding palliative care and other resources for the dying.     

Female Development-How to Operationalize What We Know

Females struggle to exist in a culture which gives the clear message that what is white and male is what has true credibility. Women, particularly in the last twenty years, have attempted to adapt to a male model of thinking, one which stresses autonomy, initiative, independence and self-sufficiency. Even if these values feel alien, women will alter their behavior to succeed or reject the values and feel less worthy. This paper has taken the theoretical work of Gilligan et al. and attempted to devise a way to intercede in this cycle through a preventive group design. Adolescent girls participate in ongoing groups where they experience a sense of confirmation and collaboration and have the opportunity to examine the dissonance between what they know internally and what the society imposes. There are suggested ways for incorporating the groups into high school and middle school settings so that the concept of female development differing from male development is one that begins to be addressed and acted upon in the educational environment.     

What You Know When You Know an Answer to a Question

A significant argument for the claim that knowing‐wh is knowing‐that, implicit in much of the literature, including Stanley and Williamson (2001), is spelt out and challenged. The argument includes the assumption that a subject's state of knowing‐wh is constituted by their involvement in a relation with an answer to a question. And it involves the assumption that answers to questions are propositions or facts. One of Lawrence Powers’ counterexamples to the conjunction of these two assumptions is developed, responses to it are rebutted, and the possibility of rejecting the second rather than the first of these assumptions is explored briefly.     

On What We are and How We Persist

This article defends novel approaches to what we are and how we persist. First it is claimed that we have disjunctive persistence conditions: we can persist by way of either biological continuity or psychological continuity. Then it is claimed that we are neither human beings nor persons essentially. Rather, we are essentially bio‐psycho‐continuers, a concept to be explained along the way. A variety of objections are considered and found wanting.     

The Impact of Incentive Compensation on the Salesperson's Work Habits: An Economic Model

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical framework for assessing the likely impact of variations in the remuneration level on a salesperson's income and sales. It is shown how salespeople who display various behavioral responses to financial incentives should have different sets of values for two observable and measurable elasticities e_i and es (elasticities of income and sales with respect to remuneration). The behavioral responses to financial incentives under consideration are: Salespersons are (1) money sensitive, (2) unresponsive to financial incentives, (3) leisure sensitive, (4) income satisfiers, and (5) “irrational”. The theory can be applied by observing and measuring the two elasticities e_i and e_s, and then inferring salespeople's work habits. The theory is consistent with some empirical data. Practical and normative implications for sales force motivation, compensation plan design, and recruiting are discussed.     

We Have Failed

SUMMARY

This article explores the changing nature of the psy-chotherapeutic world in relationship to the values crisis evident in our lack of reaction to the Gulf War. It attempts to examine the underlying valuelessness of the new post-modem psychotherapeutic systems with special attention to the impact of that changing value structure on humanistic psychotherapy, the mental health community and the significance of this shifting as it relates to the Gulf War. The author examines these philosophic systems that underlie various post-modern approaches and their challenge to universal humanism and humanistic values. Finally the reader is encouraged to reassess the underlying value base of their therapeutic, methodological, and philosophical systems.