The influence of sales-force system on salesperson's job attitude and sales performance

Abstract

Purpose: The salesperson, the core of the operating activities, plays the role of connecting the inside and outside of the company, representing the company to the consumer and identifying and responding to the customer's needs. The department store industry is the most representative retail industry in South Korea, and competition among its peer group and industry is intensifying, requiring differentiated service sales activities and performance from its employees. This study divided the sales force system into activity control(process-oriented control) and output control(performance-oriented control) and verified the differential impact on the job attitude of the salesperson (e.g., job satisfaction and burn-out), respectively In addition, the effect of job satisfaction and bum-out of the salesperson on the job performance were checked. Research design, data, and methodology: The survey was conducted on 200 sales people working at five branch stores of Hyundai department store in Seoul, and 194 of them were analyzed. The reliability and validity of the variables were analyzed and hypotheses were verified through the SEM. Results: Results have shown that activity control has a greater impact on bum-out compared to output control, and output control has a greater impact on job satisfaction compared to activity control. It has been shown that the salesperson's burn-out does not affect sales performance, but that job satisfaction has a positive effect on sales performance. Conclusions: This study examines the effect of sales force management system such as activity control and output control, on the job attitude and sales performance in department stores. According to the results of this research, each of two control systems have a discriminatory effect on the job attitude variables. For the sales managers of department store, it is recommended to increase the efficiency of sales management by increasing the use of outcome control compared to activity control.