Do salespeople who follow the Golden Rule or let their faith influence their
behavior serve their customers better or like their jobs and employers more than other
salespeople? The Golden Rule is a quote from Christ found in Matthew 7:12 NIV and is
considered a universal ethical principle taught by all major religions. It is also a
behavioral standard for many in business. A review of the sales, marketing, and
organizational literatures, however, failed to uncover studies which assess the
relationships of following the Golden Rule or a personâÂÂs faith or spirituality with key
business outcomes. Salespeople impact the performance and perception of their firms,
yet are regarded as highly unethical by the public. Therefore, an investigation of how
these variables influence their behavior seems justified.
A Golden Rule Disposition (GRD) is conceptualized as a higher-order
personality disposition which influences the traits of agape love, forgiveness, gratitude,
humility, and selflessness. Personal faith is defined as a higher order personality trait
blending a desire for a personal relationship with God (the Divine or Supreme Being)
with core personality influences on the behaviors of an individual. A comprehensive model was developed and tested using structural equation
modeling to investigate a GRDâÂÂs relationships with job satisfaction, organizational
commitment, propensity to leave, life satisfaction, and customer orientation. Personal
faithâÂÂs influence on these relationships was tested using moderated multiple regression.
Completed questionnaires were collected from 142 members of an automobile
dealerâÂÂs sales force to provide the data for this study. A GRD influenced all proposed
lower order traits except for selflessness and humility. A GRD had a positive effect on
all dependent variables except propensity to leave and life satisfaction.
Faith was not a moderator of any relationships, but was found to be positively
related to forgiveness and gratitude. A surprising result was the lack of a relationship
between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. These findings should be important to
organizations that practice the marketing concept. The combined effect of following the
Golden Rule and personal faith leads to more satisfied customers and a more stable
workforce to meet organizational goals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/5815 |
| Date | 17 September 2007 |
| Creators | Smith, James Garry |
| Contributors | Futrell, Charles M. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 722422 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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