Impact of Salesperson Attraction on Sales Managers’ Attributions and Feedback

Abstract

The authors develop a model of how a salesperson's task and social attraction affect a sales manager's causal attributions explaining the salesperson's poor performance and the manager's corrective feedback based on these attributions. The authors’ experimental results, based on a sample of 218 sales managers, suggest that (1) causal attributions, cognitive effort, and decision confidence are directly affected by task and social attraction; (2) the effects of task and social attraction on coercive feedback are mediated by internal attributions; and (3) external attributions play a partial, but negative, mediating role for nonpunitve feedback. The authors also find evidence that interpersonal affect directly influences manager feedback. Implications for research and practice are developed that recognize that appraisal processes are influenced by affect and attributional considerations, not simply bias and inaccuracy in rating performance itself.