Gritting their teeth to close the sale: the positive effect of salesperson grit on job satisfaction and performance

This research is the first to examine the effect of “grit” – defined here as perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals – on salesperson performance and job satisfaction in a business-to-business (B2B) sales context. While more commonly studied in the psychology and education literatures, grit has heretofore been underexplored in sales research, a notable omission given its importance in predicting performance outcomes across multiple domains. In response, we demonstrate that gritty salespeople perform better and enjoy greater job satisfaction than their less gritty counterparts. Moreover, we show that competitiveness and self-efficacy help to develop grit and reveal important moderating effects; grit is highest when salespeople are self-efficacious and socially astute. Moreover, the results also suggest that need for power attenuates the positive effect of grit on performance, revealing a potential “dark side” of grit. We then provide some future research ideas involving grit in an effort to encourage further exploration of this construct in sales research. Finally, we conclude by offering cautions to future researchers as they decide whether to examine this interesting construct in a sales context.     

Social discounting and delay discounting

Social discounting was measured as the amount of money a participant was willing to forgo to give a fixed amount (usually $75) to another person. In the first experiment, amount forgone was a hyperbolic function of the social distance between the giver and receiver. In the second experiment, degree of social discounting was an increasing function of reward magnitude whereas degree of delay discounting was a decreasing function of reward magnitude. In the third experiment, the shape of the function relating delayed rewards to equally valued immediate rewards for another person was predicted from individual delay and social discount functions. All in all, the studies show that the social discount function, like delay and probability discount functions, is hyperbolic in form. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Counselors' Values Profile: Implications for Counseling Ethnic Minority Clients

The authors review the empirical literature on counselors' values, describe values salient to the 4 largest ethnic minority groups in the United States, identify similarities and differences between counselors' values and those of the minority groups, and discuss implications for counseling ethnically different clients. Understanding counselors' values can lead to an examination of how these values may affect the counseling process, particularly when clients are from ethnic minority groups that may espouse differing cultural values.     

Informational intra‐group influence: the effects of time pressure and group size

The judgments of groups have immense impact on our daily lives. This paper theorizes that three families of intra‐group influence affect the collective estimation process. These different forms of influence map to different levels of task demonstrability, or the extent to which correct answers are transparent to problem‐solvers. When demonstrability is low, group estimates are disproportionately influenced by proposals closer to the intra‐group mean (centrality). When demonstrability is high and groups are small, group decisions are disproportionately influenced by proposals closer to the correct answer (accuracy). Finally, when demonstrability is high and groups are larger, group decisions are disproportionately influenced by proposals offered by generally more accurate individuals across a set of judgments (expertise). Three laboratory studies support our predictions with regard to informational influence in cooperative groups. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Screening for eating disorders in primary care: EDE-Q versus SCOFF

OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: The comparative validity of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) (22 items) and SCOFF (five items) in screening for cases of the more commonly occurring eating disorders was examined in a primary care sample of young adult women (n=257). Diagnoses were confirmed in a sub-group of interviewed participants (n=147). RESULTS: Twenty-five cases, primarily variants of bulimia nervosa (BN) not meeting formal diagnostic criteria, were identified in the interviewed sample. An EDE-Q global score of >or= 2.80 yielded the optimal trade-off between sensitivity (Se) (0.80) and specificity (Sp) (0.80) (positive predictive value (PPV)=0.44), whereas a score of two or more positive responses on the SCOFF was optimal (Se=0.72, Sp=0.73, PPV=0.35). Validity coefficients for both measures varied as a function of participants' age and body weight, although these effects were more pronounced for the SCOFF. CONCLUSIONS: Both measures performed well in terms of their ability to detect cases and to exclude non-cases of the more commonly occurring eating disorders in a primary care setting. The EDE-Q performed somewhat better than the SCOFF and was more robust to effects on validity of age and weight. These findings need to be weighed against the advantage of the SCOFF in terms of its brevity.     

Asian and European American cultural values and communication styles among Asian American and European American college students

The present study examined the relationships between adherence to Asian and European cultural values and communication styles among 210 Asian American and 136 European American college students. A principal components analysis revealed that, for both Asian Americans and European Americans, the contentious, dramatic, precise, and open styles loaded onto the first component suggesting low context communication, and interpersonal sensitivity and inferring meaning styles loaded onto the second component suggesting high context communication. Higher adherence to emotional self-control and lower adherence to European American values explained Asian Americans' higher use of the indirect communication, while higher emotional self-control explained why Asian Americans use a less open communication style than their European American counterparts. When differences between sex and race were controlled, adherence to humility was inversely related to contentious and dramatic communication styles but directly related to inferring meaning style, adherence to European American values was positively associated with precise communication and inferring meaning styles, and collectivism was positively related to interpersonal sensitivity style.     

Individual Differences in Attitudes Relevant to Juror Decision Making: Development and Validation of the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ)1

This study involves scale development using theoretically derived items from previous measures and a lay consensual approach for generating new items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the emergent constructs assessing individual differences in attitudes of prospective jurors. Using case summaries, the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ) demonstrates superior predictive validity over commonly employed measures of pretrial bias. The PJAQ confirms the importance of theoretically derived constructs assessed by other scales and introduces new constructs to the jury decision‐making literature. The attitudes assessed by the PJAQ are conviction proneness, system confidence, cynicism toward the defense, racial bias, social justice, and innate criminality. Implications for assessing such attitudes and for better understanding the decision‐making process of jurors are discussed.