The Impact of Organizational Citizenship Behavior on Evaluations of Salesperson Performance

The research objective was to examine the relative impact of “organizational citizenship behaviors” (OCBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers’ evaluations of the performance of their sales personnel. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for three diverse sales samples: (1) 261 multiline insurance agents, (2) 204 petrochemical sales representatives, and (3) 108 district sales managers working for a large pharmaceutical company. Managerial evaluations of organizational citizenship behavior and overall performance were also obtained for each of these people. The results indicate that (1) managers do recognize several different dimensions of “citizenship” behavior, and these OCBs are distinct from objective sales productivity, (2) the combination of OCBs and objective sales productivity accounts for substantially more variance in managers’ overall evaluations than typically is accounted for by sales productivity alone, and (3) the OCBs (taken as a group) consistently account for a larger portion of the variance in managerial evaluations than does sales productivity. The implications of these findings for salesforce motivation and evaluation are discussed.