Connect within to connect outside: effect of salespeople's political skill on relationship performance

Scholars have recently explored the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational relationships on salespeople's job-related outcomes. Grounded in social influence theory, we explore the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational skills on salesperson relationship performance. We empirically tested the proposed relationships using the data from a non-Western sales force working with an organization in an emerging economy. The results indicate that salespeople's political skill positively contributes to salespeople's identification with the organization and to creative performance, while strikingly, we also find that salesperson task adaptivity weakens these effects. Moreover, salespeople's identification and creative performance are positively related to customer satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that salespeople's intraorganizational relationships play a key role in enhancing customer satisfaction. In light of these results, we explore implications for marketers and academics and conclude by suggesting directions for further research.     

Everybody Will Win,and All Must Be Hired: Comparing Additivity Neglect with the Nonselective Superiority Bias

Two streams of research looking at referent‐dependent judgments from slightly different angles are subadditivity research and research on the nonselective superiority bias. Both biases violate basic formal constraints: the probabilities of a set of exclusive events cannot add up to more than 100%, and a set of attractive candidates cannot all be rated as superior to the group mean. We examine in three experiments how these two biases are related, by asking the same participants to perform both kinds of tasks on the same material. Both biases appear to be widespread, even for sets where all alternatives are presented together, but they differ in the way they are affected by response format and experimental setup. Thus, presenting participants with an unbiased set of ratings will reduce but not normalize their probability estimates of the same alternatives; while presenting them with an unbiased (additive) set of probabilities will make most alternatives appear inferior to the group mean, inverting the superiority bias. Self‐reports reveal that additivity neglect and the nonselective superiority bias can be based on two main response‐strategies: (i) considering each alternative independently or (ii) comparing alternatives, while neglecting their complementarity. In both cases, assessments will be the outcome of a compromise between the perceived “absolute” merits of each alternative, its standing relative to referents, and properties of the response scale. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Thinking about the Needy: A Reprise

This article discusses Jan Narvesons Welfare and Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Todays World, and Is World Poverty a Moral Problem for the Wealthy? and their relation to my Thinking about the Needy, Justice, and International Organizations. Section 2 points out that Narvesons concerns differ from mine, so that often his claims and mine fail to engage each other. For example, his focus is on the poor, mine the needy, and while many poor are needy, and vice versa, our obligations may differ regarding the poor than regarding the needy. Also, Narveson invokes a narrow conception of morality as those rules that government or society may compel people to follow. Given a broader, more plausible, conception of morality, many of Narvesons claims actually support my substantive views. Section 3 shows that many of Narvesons claims are relevant to the best means of aiding the needy, but do not challenge the validity of that end. This is true, for example, of his claims about the role of poor governments, the importance of freedom, the undesirability of mere handouts, and the effects of bad economic policies. Section 4 defends the importance of my distinction between acting justly and acting for reasons of justice. It illustrates that on several widely shared conceptions of justice there might be agent-neutralreasons of justice to aid the needy, even if from an agent-relative perspective one would not be acting unjustly if one failed to do so. Section 5 contests Narvesons portrayal of egalitarianism as concerned about inequality of wealth, per se, as insensitive to prior wrongs, and as holding that the worse-off have a right to be made better off at the expense of the well-off. In addition, it rejects Narvesons contention that egalitarians violate impartiality, and aim to impose their personal tastes on others. Section 6 challenges a fundamental assumption underlying Narvesons doctrine of mutual advantage. In addition, it denies that egalitarians are irrational merely because equality can conflict with the pareto principle. More generally, by appealing to impersonal ideals, it challenges the widely held view that the pareto principle is a condition of rationality. Section 7 argues that Narvesons meta-ethical assumptions are controversial, internally inconsistent, in tension with his normative views, and ultimately a version of skepticism. In addition, it challenges Narvesons view about the role intuitions play in moral theory. Section 8 clarifies points where Narvesons discussion of my views may be misleading. Finally, the paper notes the role that moral reasons may play in deliberation and action, but emphasizes the philosophical and theoretical nature of my work. My aim is to determine the moral considerations that are relevant to how people should act regarding the needy. Whether people will actually be moved to so act, for those reasons or otherwise, is another matter.     

越老越风险规避吗？——年龄对冲动性预测决策行为的调节效应

年老化伴随着风险承担倾向的改变,而决策行为受冲动性的影响是否受到年龄的调节尚不清楚。研究采用两种不同类型的决策任务以及Barratt冲动性量表,考察老年人风险承担在自我报告和决策行为上的改变。结果显示老年人在剑桥博弈任务中更加风险寻求而在模拟充气球任务中更加风险规避。同时冲动性可以显著预测模拟充气球的行为,且该预测受到年龄的调节。研究结果提示,老年人并不是单一的更加风险规避或者风险寻求,而是与任务特异性相关。同时,冲动性可以较好的预测年轻人的决策行为,而对老年人的决策行为没有预测作用。     

Comparative optimism and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic

Past research suggests that being comparatively optimistic about one's risk for disease is associated with benefits to mental health, such as lowered stress and anxiety. However, few studies have longitudinally examined whether comparative optimism has the same protective benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study examined levels of comparative optimism, changes in comparative optimism over time, and the association between comparative optimism and COVID-related mental and physical health outcomes among a US adult sample during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants completed online surveys at four timepoints, over the course of four weeks in May and June of 2020. Results from paired-samples t-tests revealed that comparative optimism was present, such that participants estimated their risk for COVID-19 as being significantly lower than that of others their age and sex. Results from linear mixed models suggested that people who were more comparatively optimistic reported lower anxiety, depression, and stress. However, at times when people were more comparatively optimistic, they also reported greater depression and poorer sleep quality. Together, the findings suggest that the relationship between comparative optimism and health may be more complex than previously anticipated and further research is needed to examine the potential pathways through which comparative optimism affects health.     

Inferring salesperson capability using stochastic frontier analysis

This paper proposes an easy-to-implement econometric method for inferring salesperson capability from archival panel data, namely stochastic frontier (SF) analysis. We demonstrate this method with a sample of salespersons provided by a life insurance company. Using the proposed SF model, we are able to estimate each salesperson’s capability. Furthermore, we examine the relationship between the estimated salesperson capability and three future outcomes (i.e. future sales performance, future customer attrition, and future salesperson turnover) under different time horizons. We find that, in general, the estimated salesperson capability has a stronger explanatory power for the near than for the more distant future. Since an individual salesperson’s capability cannot be directly observed by researchers (and thus is typically omitted), traditional analyses of sales performance suffer from an omitted-variable problem that can lead to biased estimates of focal variables. The SF model can significantly mitigate this omitted-variable problem. Statistical tests indicate that our sales performance model with estimated salesperson capability results in a statistically significant improvement in model fit. Of note, our model differs methodologically from SF models previously used in the marketing literature in that it is based on a three-component model that disentangles unobserved individual heterogeneity, efficiency, and random shocks.     

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.     

Ideas of justice and reconstructions of Confucian justice

Confucianism tends to play only a marginal role in current theorizing about justice, which is a global pursuit dominated by Western theory and its strong tendency to assume that justice refers to some substantive conception of distributive, socioeconomic justice. This article examines and compares reconstructions of Confucian justice by Joseph Chan, May Sim, and Fan Ruiping. Each reconstruction makes reference to both classical and modern Western justice theory and thus each involves a comparative approach; indeed, each reconstruction seeks ultimately, in its own distinctive fashion, to present a version of Confucian justice that is comparable with modern Western justice theory. In this article we assess, critically and comparatively, the tertium comparationis and the arguments in each reconstruction. While our analysis does not wholly endorse any of the reconstructions, it shows that there is a richness and vitality to Confucian justice theory that merits proper consideration in justice theory conceived as a truly global and cosmopolitan discipline.     

Jesus' Prophethood and Islam: Insights from the Risale‐i Nur

While Jesus’ prophethood is an indisputable component of his identity in the Christian tradition, it has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior. In this article, I argue that an engagement with an understanding of Jesus’ prophethood in Islam, particularly as explicated by the Turkish thinker Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, can help Christians recover a more robust interpretation of Jesus as prophet that has a positive impact on a Christian articulation of the church and of discipleship today.     

The Religious Context of Welfare Attitudes

This article examines the influence of three dimensions of religion—belonging (faith tradition membership), behaving (frequency of service attendance), and context (one's relationship to aggregate population characteristics)—on attitudes toward multiple forms of state‐provided social protection, or welfare attitudes. To do so, this article uses data from 17 countries surveyed in the 2006 “Role of Government” wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Results from mixed effects regression show that contextual effects are highly predictive of welfare attitudes. Nations that are more religiously heterogeneous are less supportive of state protection, while nations that are more homogeneous, particularly Catholic nations, are more supportive. Results hold net of fractionalization, political institutional measures, and economic characteristics. At the individual level, all three dimensions of religiosity are predictive of welfare attitudes. These patterns suggest that in rich Western democracies, religion continues to play an important role in structuring the moral economies.