A longitudinal study of newcomer job embeddedness and sales outcomes for life insurance salespersons

Abstract

From the perspective of job embeddedness theory, this study explores the influence of sales training and job embeddedness on the sales performance and turnover behavior of newcomer employees.To acquire performance and turnover data, this study surveys 327 new financial salespersons after they have spent some time at a large life insurance company. With this data, the study uses regression to explore the hypotheses. Given that salespersons are heterogeneous, the study also employs quantile regression to clarify the effects of sales training and job embeddedness on sales performance.The empirical results support the following conclusions: first, in general, sales training is partially associated with sales outcomes, while job embeddedness is positively related to sales performance and negatively related to turnover. In particular, the model accurately predicts the consequences for newcomers with below-midlevel sales, suggesting that job embeddedness effectively improves the sales of poor performers.