UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Nguyen Thi Han EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, ADAPTIVE SELLING, IMPROVISATION AND SALES PERFORMANCE. A STUDY ON SALESPEOPLE IN HO CHI MINH CITY. MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City-Year 2016 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Nguyen Thi Han EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, ADAPTIVE SELLING, IMPROVISATION AND SALES PERFORMANCE. A STUDY ON SALESPEOPLE IN HO CHI MINH CITY.
ID: 22130019 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: Dr. LE NHAT HANH Ho Chi Minh City-Year 2016 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Firstly, I would like to express my gratefulness to my supervisor Dr. Le Nhat Hanh for her professional guidance, intensive support, valuable suggestions, instructions and encouragement during the time of doing my research. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr.
Nguyen Dong Phong, Dr. Tran Ha Minh Quan, Dr. Nguyen Dinh Tho, Dr. Nguyen TN Que and Dr.
Pham Phu Quoc for their valuable time as the members of the thesis examination committee. Their comments and meaningful suggestions were contributed significantly for my completion of this research. My sincere thanks are given to all of my teachers at International Business School – University of Economics of Ho Chi Minh City for their teaching and guidance during my master course. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT Today, the market is extremely competitive, many international retail groups have entered the market, providing greater choices for consumers whilst creating intense competitive challenges.
A key challenge facing firms is to determine how to deploy highly effective salesforce in order to perform in this complex environment. In this dissertation, the study examines the mutual impact of emotional intelligence on adaptive selling and improvisation, and subsequently exploring its effect on sales performance in Vietnam. A combination of mail and in person survey was used to collect the data. A pilot test was conducted prior to final survey administration.
The results of the data illustrated strong support for the conceptual model. This study contribute to sales management literature by understanding emotional intelligence-sales performance relationship. Consequently, these findings indicate several managerial implications for recruitment, training, work practices, and policies at the workplace. Key words: emotional intelligence, adaptive selling, improvisation and sales performance LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ABSTRACT ABBREVIATION Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION.1 Background to the research and research problem.
5 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.1 Adaptive selling and Improvisation .4 Adaptive selling, Improvisation and Sales Performance .5 Emotional Intelligence and Sales performance .2 Data analysis procedures. 23 Chapter 4: DATA ANALYSIS .1 CFA for the first-order constructs .2 CFA for second-order constructs .3 CFA for the final measurement model .3 Structural equation modeling (SEM). 44 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 5: CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND LIMITATION.2 Limitations and future research. 56 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 CFA model of Improvisation .2 CFA model of Adaptive selling .3 CFA model of Sales Performance .4 CFA model of Emotional Intelligence .5 Final measurement model.
42 LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1 Source of data collection .2 The first run of CFA (of Improvisation, Adaptive selling and Sales performance) 29 Table 4.3 Summarized of CR, AVE and Cronbach’α (first order constructs) .4 The first run of CFA (Emotional Intelligence) .5 Summarized of CR, AVE and Cronbach’α (Emotional Intelligence) .7 Summarized of CR, AVE and Cronbach’α (final model).8 CFA Summary of eliminated item .10 Unstandardized structural paths. 43 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A List of in-depth interviews’ participants. 61 Appendix B Qualitative in-depth interview. 61 Appendix C Qualitative in-depth interview findings.
70 Appendix F Correlations among components of Emotional Intelligence, Adaptive selling, Improvisation and Sales Performance. 73 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABBREVIATION AVE Averaged variance extracted CFA Confirmatory Factor Analysis EI Emotional Intelligence HR Human Resource MSCEIT Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test SEM Structural equation modeling SPSS Statistical Package for the Social Sciences TNS Taylor Nelson Sofres TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement WTO World Trade Organization LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the research and research problem Over the last 30 years since Doi Moi, the policy of opening the country and integrating into the international economy has become a primary strategy of Viet Nam, in line with structural reforms, aiming at economic growth and sustainable development. The reforms have changed the lives of Vietnamese consumers. At present, the country represents an attractive market with vast potential.
According to Kearney (2008), with a population of nearly 90 million people, rapid economic development, relative political stability, and an underdeveloped local retail system, it was the most attractive emerging market destination for retail investment. Major international retailers wish to penetrate deep into this market. In accordance with its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments— Vietnam became a member of the WTO in 2007—Vietnam fully opened its retail sector after January 2009. Furthermore, Vietnam also stand out among the TPP countries and Vietnam’s average applied tariffs on imports are 9.5%, one of the highest levels among TPP members.
Many international retail groups have entered the market, providing greater choices for consumers whilst creating intense competitive challenges for domestic players. Domestic retailers and the Vietnamese authorities have raised concerns about losing market share to new foreign retail giants. A relatively young population, coupled with rising income levels, increased urbanisation, and an attractive business environment supported by lower trade barriers and reduced corporate tax rates, have enhanced Vietnam’s position as a high potential growth market. A survey by the Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) World Panel Vietnam revealed three major characteristics among the new generation of consumers.
First, they are younger than those in the previous generations (50 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com percent of Vietnamese consumers are less than thirty years old) and have high and complicated product requirements. Second, they spend more on body and health care products and appreciate product utility. Third, they tend to enjoy shopping in safe and comfortable environments (VNN 2008). So, with the increasing incomes and living standards, they have become more concerned about the quality, hygiene and safety of the products purchased.
Hence, there has been a slight shift towards modern trade outlets for the hygienic, convenient and friendly shopping environments that they offer. Enterprises have also implemented a wide variety of programmes to build customer loyalty and attract new customers. These active young consumers represent a powerful new consumer force driving trends that affect most of the country’s industries, especially the modern retail sector. Fundamental issues of the customer and their expectations involve around three magical questions 1.What else? Salespeople are facing the challenge of structuring the new product development processes.
At the same time, organizations are constrained by limited financial and human resources, a lack of a market orientation. As a result, the role of organizations and individuals in providing goods and service is continuously developing, the sale function is required to adapt and change. Therefore, a salesforce must have a wide range of skills to compete successfully. This is because nothing can replace the power of personal sales-force in generating sales and building strong, loyal customer relationship (Kurtz & Boone, 2008; Kotler & Armstrong, 2005; Paparoidomis & Guenzi, 2009).
Boone and Kurtz claim that “professional salespersons are problem-solvers who focus on satisfying the needs of customers before, during and after the sales are made” (2008, p. Salespeople arm themselves with knowledge about their firm’s goods and services, those of competitors and their customer’s business needs, and pursue a common goal of creating long-term relationships with customers. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Salespeople play a key role not only in customer relationship management but also in understanding, creating, communicating and delivering values to customers, which in turn increases the sales performance of the firm (Paparoidomis & Guenzi, 2009; Weitz & Bradford, 1999). Firms need to have very high performing, productive and motivated salespersons in order to succeed.
Therefore, it is not surprising that practitioners and researchers have long sought to gain deep insight into the characteristics of an effective salespersons. In the past two decades, researchers within the field of selling have prescribed many different relational-selling behaviors to salespeople, presumably leading to better sales performance, such as customer-oriented selling (Schwepker, 2003), adaptive selling (Park & Holloway, 2003), key account selling (Guenzi, Pardo & Georges, 2007; Jones et al., 2005), and relationship selling (Crosby, Evans & Cowles, 1990). In a similar vein, the focus in the evolved sales process, leading to high performance, is on customer relationship maintenance, satisfying needs, and nurturing relationships (Moncreif & Marshall, 2005). All these different prescriptions or requirements of the salespeople demand advanced interpersonal skills such as the ability to handle conflicts (Weitz & Bradford, 1999) and be empathic (Rozell, Pettijohn & Parker, 2004) or persuasive (Cron et al.
On the other hand, several studies have examined specific emotions in marketing encounters such as fear and anxiety (Verbeke & Bagozzi, 2000), cheerfulness and excitement (Chitturi, Raghunathan & Mahajan, 2008), gratitude (Palmatier et al., 2009), anger and frustration (Wagner, Hennig-Thurau & Rudolph, 2009), and shame and guilt (Agrawal & Duhachek, 2010), research has not addressed salespeople’s abilities to recognize and respond to their own and their customers’ emotions and have not considered how these abilities affect building relationships between salespersons and clients and sales performance. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Emotional intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge from one’s emotions and those of others to produce beneficial outcomes (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Previous studies in this area have generally examined the salespersons from mostly Western countries such as the United States of America (Anderson & Nichols, 2007; Barrick, Parks & Mount, 2005), the United Kingdom (Souchon et al. Many researchers agree that in order to generalise the model of the impact of human behaviour on successful performance, it is essential to examine the effects under various environmental situations and circumstances (Lopez, Carr, Grgory & Dwyer, 2005; Wong & Law, 2002).
In Vietnam, emotional intelligence has been studied in employee engagement (Khuong & Yen, 2014). The marketing literature has largely ignored this ability-based conceptualization of emotional intelligence despite its potential to benefit people who have high emotional intelligence and also those with whom they interact, such as customers, in exchange relationships. For example, recent research has suggested that sellers’ greater emotion recognition during negotiations with buyers can increase payoffs for both sellers and buyers (Elfenbein et al. By increasing joint value, sales professionals create greater outcome satisfaction for buyers and increase the likelihood of future business (Martin et al.
In addition, research in a service setting suggests that employees’ displays of emotion can affect customers’ affective states and satisfaction (Hennig-Thurau et al. Thus, emotional intelligence has the potential to improve current sales performance and enhance long-term customer relationships. However, several other studies have suggested that sales performance could also be related to differences in adaptive selling behaviour (Franke & Park, 2006) and differences in improvisation (Moorman & Miner, 1998). Cote and Miners (2006) also conclude that the relationship of emotional intelligence to 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com performance is not always linear.
In response, the study examines the mutual impact of emotional intelligence on adaptive selling and improvisation, and subsequently exploring its effect on sales performance in Vietnam.2 Research objectives As mention above, this study examine the role of emotional intelligence on adaptive selling and improvisation and subsequently in sales performance of salespeople who are working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.