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Do citizenship behaviors matter more for managers than for salespeople?

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Abstract

This research was designed to investigate the effects of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers’ evaluations of their sales personnel’s performance and to examine whether the impact of OCBs on performance evaluations is greater at higher levels of the sales organization hierarchy. Two samples were obtained from the same organization: a sample of 987 multiline insurance agents and a sample of 161 agency managers. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for both samples along with evaluations of three dimensions of OCBs and an assessment of overall performance. The results indicate that managers’ evaluations are determined at least as much by OCBs as they are by objective measures of performance. After partialing out common method variance, the results also indicate that OCBs account for a greater proportion of a sales manager’s evaluation than of a sales representative’s evaluation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Indiana, USA

    Scott B. MacKenzie, Philip M. Podsakoff & Julie Beth Paine

Authors
  1. Scott B. MacKenzie
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  2. Philip M. Podsakoff
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  3. Julie Beth Paine
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Additional information

Scott B. MacKenzie (Ph.D., UCLA, 1983) is a professor of marketing and the Edgar G. Williams Faculty Fellow at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His research on advertising effectiveness, organizational citizenship behavior, and leadership issues can be found in theJournal of marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, andThe Leadership Quarterly. Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, andJournal of Consumer Psychology.

Philip M. Podsakoff (D.B.A., Indiana University, 1980) is the John F. Mee Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. He is the author or coauthor of more than 60 articles and/or scholarly book chapters that have appeared in such journals as theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Academy of Management Journal, Psychological Bulletin, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Applied Psychology, The Leadership Quarterly, Organizational Dynamics, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Business Studies, andJournal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. He serves on the Board of Editors of theJournal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, andThe Leadership Quarterly.

Julie Beth Paine is a doctoral student in management at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Her research interests include competence in performance, performance evaluation processes, and reward systems.

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MacKenzie, S.B., Podsakoff, P.M. & Paine, J.B. Do citizenship behaviors matter more for managers than for salespeople?. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 27, 396–410 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070399274001

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