Date of Award

Winter 2006

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Department

Marketing and Analysis

First Advisor

Bruce Alford

Abstract

Extant literature on goal oriented behaviors suggests that individual goal orientation is an important determinant of a salesperson's job satisfaction and job performance. However, the present conceptualization of goal orientation suffers from flawed paradigmatic structure. There are two major disparate paradigms of goal orientation in the extant literature. The first paradigm views goal orientation as a stable personality trait and the second paradigm views it as contextually driven phenomenon. The present study proffers a new approach of conceptualizing individual goal orientation, by introducing the meta-model of Life Management Strategies (Baltes and Baltes, 1998; Freund and Baltes, 1998) in the personal selling domain. Utilizing the Life Management Strategies model this study extends a single paradigm of goal oriented behavior, which combines the dispositional and contextual paradigm of goal orientation.

This study presents a second-order LMS construct, which subsumes the three life management strategies, namely elective selection strategy, optimization strategy and compensation strategy. The second-order LMS construct capture salesperson's goal-setting, goal-pursuit and goal-striving. The second-order LMS construct is an overarching construct which captures the motivation of an individual to engage in goal-oriented behavior. Furthermore, the relationship between the second-order LMS construct with two seminal individual performance outcomes: job satisfaction and job performance is examined in a personal selling context. Results indicate the second-order LMS construct predicts salesperson's job satisfaction and job performance above and beyond goal orientation.

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