Effective Interpersonal Listening in the Personal Selling Environment: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Nomological Validity

Development and validation of the active empathetic listening scale

“…A positive association between relationship quality and effective listening has been theorized (Brownell, 1995) and suggested empirically by a positive association between customers' anticipated future interaction with salespeople and the quality of listening of the salespeople (Ramsey & Sohi, 1997). Performance effectiveness has been linked to effective listening theoretically (Castleberry & Shepherd, 1993;Comer & Drollinger, 1999) and the link has been confirmed empirically (Castleberry, Shepherd, & Ridnour, 1999). Significant positive correlations were anticipated among the three constructs and salespeople's self-reported AEL skills.…”

The Influence of the Compensation System and Personal Variables on a Salesperson's Effective Listening Behaviour

“…According to the personal selling literature, interpersonal listening has three stages: sensing, processing and responding (Castleberry and Shepherd 1993;Ramsey and Sohi 1997;Castleberry et al 1999;Comer and Drollinger 1999). They represent consecutive stages in the listening process, which implies that a message must be sensed before it is processed, and must be processed before it can be responded to (Comer and Drollinger 1999).…”

“…The personal variables investigated here (salesperson's ability, intrinsic motivation, gender, education and experience) have been found to be important characteristics of salespeople (Jobber and Millar 1984) that affect their behaviour and performance (Churchill et al 1985). Because of the inexistence of previous studies analysing the effects of personal variables on effective listening (except that single correlation reported by Castleberry et al 1999), these variables were selected from the literature addressing key behaviours in sales encounters that are closely related to effective listening such as adaptive selling (e.g. Weitz et al 1986;Sujan et al 1988;Szymanski 1988;Spiro and Weitz 1990;Goolsby et al 1992;Levy and Sharma 1994;Boorom et al 1998) and customer-oriented selling (e.g.…”

“…Only Castleberry et al (1999), who developed a scale to measure effective listening from the salesperson's point of view, also calculated the correlation between listening and experience, and concluded the following: "although the correlation between listening and experience was statistically significant, it was quite low, and may not have much practical significance. Future research should certainly further explore this relationship" (p.36).…”

“…In this line, research by Ramsey and Sohi (1997) and de Ruyter and Wetzels 206 Sergio Román, Salvador Ruiz and Jose Luis Munuera (2000) indicates that customers' perceptions of a salesperson's listening behaviour play a major role in enhancing relational outcomes such as customer satisfaction, trust and anticipation of future interaction with the salesperson. From the salesperson's perspective, empirical research has shown that effective listening leads to higher sales performance (Shepherd et al 1997;Castleberry et al 1999). This explains why companies such as Xerox, General Electric, Ford or IBM began several years ago listening training programs for their salespeople (Papa and Glenn 1988).…”