Do Citizenship Behaviors Matter More for Managers Than for Salespeople

TLDR: In this paper, the authors investigate the effects of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers' evaluations of their sales personnel's performance and examine whether the impact of OCBs on performance evaluations is greater at higher levels of the sales organization hierarchy.

Abstract: This research was designed to investigate the effects of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers’ evaluations of their sales personnel’s performance and to examine whether the impact of OCBs on performance evaluations is greater at higher levels of the sales organization hierarchy. Two samples were obtained from the same organization: a sample of 987 multiline insurance agents and a sample of 161 agency managers. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for both samples along with evaluations of three dimensions of OCBs and an assessment of overall performance. The results indicate that managers’ evaluations are determined at least as much by OCBs as they are by objective measures of performance. After partialing out common method variance, the results also indicate that OCBs account for a greater proportion of a sales manager’s evaluation than of a sales representative’s evaluation. The implications of these findings are discussed.