고객의 긍정피드백이 영업사원의 고객지향성과 판매성과에 미치는 영향 : 긍정심리자본의 형성을 중심으로

초록

With the expansion of channels for collecting customer opinions and feedback, firms increasingly seek ways to enhance employees’ positivity. Prior research has particularly emphasized the importance of employee positivity in service industries such as hospitality. However, sales organizations, where performance indicators are regarded as critical, have recently sought to upgrade employees’ customer-handling capabilities to improve competitiveness. Accordingly, discussion on enhancing employees’positivity has been expanded across a wide range of industries. This study chose salespeople as the research subjects to examine the influence and importance of customers’positive feedback in the sales field. We explored how customers’positive feedback affects the formation of salespeople’s psychological capital and analyzed how such psychological capital, once formed, influences salespeople’s self-perceived customer orientation and sales performance. We divided customers’positive feedback into institutional positive feedback, accompanied by organizational rewards, and informal positive feedback, which lacks organizational rewards but confers psychological positivity through communication with customers. This study investigated these two respective effects. To examine salespeople’s psychological factors, we conducted in-depth interviews with ten salespeople engaged in selling home appliances, and then analyzed how salespeople who receive customers’ positive feedback form the four components of psychological capital—self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience—and examined how these ultimately affect customer orientation and sales performance. Results offer three main findings from the interviews. First, both institutional and informal positive feedback from customers had positive effects on salespeople. Second, both types of customer positive feedback helped to foster the four components of salespeople’s psychological capital. Third, institutional and informal positive feedback from customers positively affected salespeople’s self-perceived customer orientation and sales performance, and we found that the formation of psychological capital functions effectively in this process. Theoretically, this study specifies the process how institutional and informal customer feedback shape frontline employees’ psychological capital, thereby linking customer-to-employee feedback to customer orientation and sales performance and extending feedback research beyond supervisor-sourced feedback and hospitality-centric service settings. We also provide practical insight by suggesting that leveraging both institutional and informal customer positive feedback can build psychological capital and sales performance.

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