Why is customer-oriented selling not practiced widely? The purpose of this research was to identify the relationships between factors that may be related to the practice of customer-oriented selling: Salesperson job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and skills. A survey of 109 retail salespeople provided insights into the relationships between these variables. The findings focused on the importance of the relationships existing between salesperson skills, training, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and salesperson customer orientation. ᭧

salesperson ethics, ethics and business relationships, ethics and job satisfaction, ethics and turnover, ethics measures,

Sales managers seem to be on a never-ending quest to improve the productivity of their personnel. Contests, commissions, territory redesign, training, sales meetings, travel, and various recognition awards are a few of the methods that have been used to coax performance improvements from a sales force. Although each of these methods of performance enhancement can provide tangible and intangible benefits to the firm, most businesses already use one other method of enhancing sales performance: the performance evaluation (Dubinsky and Barry, 1982). Dubinsky, Skinner, and Whittler (1989) contend that appraisals can be used to determine rewards, provide managerial feedback, help to monitor the effectiveness of human resource management decisions, help to evaluate training and development needs, and provide human resource planning and budgeting information. In the realm of sales management, performance appraisals have been described as the most important factor influencing sales behavior (DeCarlo and Leigh, 1996). Along these lines, Morris, Davis, Allen, Avila, and Chapman (1991, p. 25) argue that "performance appraisals have become one of the sales manager' s most critical responsibilities," with an organization' s success or failure conceivably determined based on the ways in which performance is managed (Mucsyk and Gable, 1987).The purpose of this research is to explore the potential relationship between characteristics of the appraisal process and the resulting level of

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In some sales organizations the performance appraisal is treated as a bureaucratic exercise. As such, sales managers may essentially conduct appraisals in an arbitrary and perfunctory manner. This behavior could be based on the belief that conducting performance appraisals requires considerable amounts of time and effort, generates few rewards, and adds considerably to the manager's level of conflict and stress. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships existing between performance appraisals, salesperson organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. If various characteristics of performance appraisals that build commitment and satisfaction could be identified, then managers may be more capable of using performance appraisals that yield positive results. A survey of 185 retail salespeople and 58 retail sales managers provided the data required to evaluate the relationship between