Salesperson self-regulation of pride: Effects on adaptability, effort, and citizenship behaviors between independent-based and interdependent-based cultures

Abstract

We investigate and compare how salespersons within an independent-based culture (the Netherlands) and an interdependent-based culture (the Philippines) experience and self-regulate pride that is evoked through praise and recognition by their managers. This self-regulation differentially influences behavior toward customers (through adaptive resource utilization and effort put forth) and colleagues (via company citizenship behaviors). For Dutch employees, the impact of pride on adaptive resource utilization and working hard in front of customers was moderated by dispositional proneness to pride and the tendency to self-regulate one's pride so as to avoid hubris; toward colleagues, the experience of pride directly affected citizenship behaviors as main effects. For Filipinos, experienced pride had main effects on adaptive resource utilization and working hard in front of customers. With respect to citizenship behaviors, the effects of experienced pride were moderated by dispositional proneness to pride. As firms operate in international contexts and seek to sell to people from different cultures, managers need to understand how pride and its self-regulation function so as to better select, train, coach, compensate, and manage the salesforce.