Assessing the Validity of Sales Self-Efficacy: A Cautionary Tale

We developed a focused, context-specific measure of sales self-efficacy and assessed its incremental validity against the broad Big 5 personality traits with department store salespersons, using (a) both a concurrent and a predictive design and (b) both objective sales measures and supervisory ratin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of applied psychology 2013-07, Vol.98 (4), p.690-700
Main Authors: Gupta, Nina, Ganster, Daniel C., Kepes, Sven
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Commerce
Contextual analysis
Department stores
Female
Five Factor Personality Model
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Job Performance
Male
Measurement
Meta-analysis
Occupational psychology
Personality
Personality - physiology
Personality Traits
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychometrics
Psychometrics - instrumentation
Reproducibility of Results
Sales
Sales Personnel
Salespeople
Salespersons
Self Efficacy
Self esteem
Selfefficacy
Surveys and Questionnaires - standards
Task Performance and Analysis
Test Validity
Validation studies
Validity
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:We developed a focused, context-specific measure of sales self-efficacy and assessed its incremental validity against the broad Big 5 personality traits with department store salespersons, using (a) both a concurrent and a predictive design and (b) both objective sales measures and supervisory ratings of performance. We found that in the concurrent study, sales self-efficacy predicted objective and subjective measures of job performance more than did the Big 5 measures. Significant differences between the predictability of subjective and objective measures of performance were not observed. Predictive validity coefficients were generally lower than concurrent validity coefficients. The results suggest that there are different dynamics operating in concurrent and predictive designs and between broad and contextualized measures; they highlight the importance of distinguishing between these designs and measures in meta-analyses. The results also point to the value of focused, context-specific personality predictors in selection research.
ISSN:0021-9010
1939-1854
DOI:10.1037/a0032232