The paper was submitted to the Journal of Personal Selling in 2014.
NEIL LILFORD
Division of Industrial Marketing
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden
And
PIERRE BERTHON, PhD
Clifford F. Youse Chair of Marketing & Strategy
Information Design & Corporate Communications
McCallum School of Business
Bentley University
Waltham, 02452, USA
ABSTRACT
This study explores salespersons’s views of Linderbaum’s and Levy’s (2010) Feedback-Orientation Scale (FOS). A qualitative study of in-depth, face-to-face interviews was conducted with salespersons from the petrochemical and financial-service industries. While the study confirmed the perceived validity of the six dimensions of the FOS, it emerged that for salespersons, feedback orientation was only part of a wider picture, which we term the quality of the feedback environment (QFE). Content analysis of the interviews suggests that quality of the feedback environment is a function of four dimensions: source (who), content (what), manner (how), and time (when) the feedback was given. The study synthesizes insights into four propositions on the quality of a person’s feedback environment, and its relationship with feedback orientation.
The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of the new construct for future research and practice.
Key words: Feedback orientation, quality, performance, feedback environment