Personal selling constructs and measures: emic versus etic approaches to cross‐national research

Abstract

Marketing researchers and practitioners are recognizing that, to succeed, firms must cater to customers within the context of their environment (Wind and Robertson, 1983). This environment is increasingly becoming international. Indeed, customers and competitors are now likely to reside half-way around the world and to possess an entirely different cultural heritage, impacting on personal selling accordingly (Walle, 1986). The complex and demanding global environment certainly affects personal selling -perhaps more so than any other" area of the global enterprise. When faced with cross-cultural settings, the necessary attributes for potential success in sales positions can often be disguised, resulting in poor evaluations or exhibitions of cultural idiosyncracies being assessed by an "outsider". This is reflected in Terpstra's (1987, p. 482) comment that "personal selling is more culturebound than impersonal advertising. As a result, even though international business has expanded tremendously in recent decades, personal selling activities are still conducted primarily on a national basis". Thus, a great concern for marketers and sales managers is the development of measures that will be useful in assessing salesperson behaviour and performance across national boundaries.To what degree can personal selling approaches be generalized across national and cultural boundaries? A more basic question deals with the appropriateness of cross-national application of personal selling constructs and measures that were developed and validated in the USA.The purpose of our research is to evaluate the transportability of personal selling measures across cultural boundaries. In the next section, we briefly review the concept of measurement development and then distinguish between etic and emic approaches to developing measures for cross-cultural Personal selling constructs and measures 83European joumai of Marketing,

Making the Most Out of Export Information: An Exploratory Study of UK and New Zealand Exporters

“…Cross-national equivalence broadly includes equivalence of variables (or functional and conceptual equivalence) and equivalence of scaling (or instrument equivalence); see, for example, Nasif et al (1991) and Singh (1995). With regards to the former, when business cultures are similar, existing measures will usually carry compatible meaning across the different countries at hand (Herche et al 1996). In this context, using Hofstede's (1980) cultural scores on uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity, and individualism, it can be seen that the business cultures in the UK and New Zealand are not too dissimilar: in fact they share the Western traits associated with other Western European countries (see Appendix 1).…”

SOCO's impact on individual sales performance: The integration of selling skills as a missing link

“…When performance and SOCO have been assessed at the firm level, the results have generally been inconclusive or weak [we invite the reader to consult Schwepker (2003) for a detailed treatment of this issue]. One area which has seen heavy attention is that of organizational level factors as they come to impact SOCO, including culture (Herche, Swenson, & Verbeke, 1996;Williams & Attaway, 1996), climate (Mulki, Jaramillo, & Locander, 2006), and ethics (Howe, Hoffman, & Hardigree, 1994;Verbeke, Ouwerkerk, & Peelen, 1996). Several studies have also evaluated customer orientation's impact on the salesperson's role conflict and role ambiguity (Flaherty et al, 1999;Johnston, Parasuraman, & Futrell, 1989;Siguaw & Honeycutt, 1995).…”

The impact of strategic account managers' behaviors on relational outcomes: An empirical study

“…This contribution is appreciable, as cross-cultural validation of constructs has sometimes led to controversial findings (e.g. Herche, Swenson & Verbeke, 1996).…”