A Contingency Approach to Adaptive Selling Behavior and Sales Performance: Selling Situations and Salesperson Characteristics

On the Role of Empathy in Customer-Employee Interactions

“…Empathic employees understand their customers' needs more fully and are therefore able to tailor their interactive behaviors to specific customers (Giacobbe et al 2006;Pettijohn et al 2000;Weitz 1978). Additionally, because empathy enhances employees' understanding of customer needs, higher levels of customer satisfaction result (Homburg, Wieseke, and Bornemann 2009).…”

“…In employee-customer interactions, employee empathy is vital for identifying and satisfying customer needs (Aggarwal et al 2005;Giacobbe et al 2006). The more accurately frontline employees sense how a customer receives the service, the more precisely they can react to these perceptions and target their interaction behavior to customer expectations (Bettencourt and Gwinner 1996;Gwinner et al 2005).…”

“…Salesperson's intellectual understanding of their customers' situation (perspective-taking) and their ability to sense, process, and respond to their customers' feelings (empathic concern) Dawson, Soper, and Pettijohn (1992) Interpersonal process Process of understanding the client's needs Fisher, Vandenbosch, and Antia (2008) Experience, emotional response Emotional response congruent with the perceived welfare of another Giacobbe et al (2006) Ability, comprising cognitive and affective components Ability of salespeople to spontaneously adopt the perspective of their customers through intellectual apprehension of their mental state or condition and by generating a genuine feeling of concern for the customer Homburg, Wieseke, and Bornemann (2009) Ability, cognitive phenomenon Ability to understand and identify with the perspective of the customer Lamont and Lundstrom (1977) Ability, comprising an emotional and a cognitive dimension A salesperson's ability to feel as the other person does to enhance the ability to sell a product or service Pilling and Eroglu (1999) Ability, comprising an emotional and a cognitive dimension…”

Antecedents of adaptive selling among retail salespeople: A multilevel analysis

“…One primary benefit of ASB is that it results in improved sales performance (Román and Iacobucci, 2010). Consequently, significant research effort has been devoted to identifying factors that influence the practice of ASB (Román and Iacobucci, 2010;Giacobbe, Jackson, Crosby and Bridges, 2006). These factors include role conflict, sales experience (Levy and Sharma, 1994;Siguaw, 1993), empathy, locus of control, management (Spiro and Weitz, 1990), intrinsic reward orientation, psychological androgyny (Goolsby, Lagace and Boorom, 1992), learning orientations, job satisfaction (Park and Holloway, 2003), pride, self-efficacy and civic virtue (Verbeke, Belschak and Bagozzi, 2004).…”

The Influence of Critical Success Factors on B2B Sales Performance and the Mediating Role of Social Intelligence

“…Moreover, by increasing adaptive selling behavior emotional intelligence influences the sales performance positively. Giacobbe et al (2006) found that empathy during sales interactions helped sales representatives to establish and show adaptive behaviors during sales interactions. Rapport building is also crucial for sales representatives (Spiro and Weitz, 1990).…”