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
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