The effects of humour usage by financial advisors in sales encounters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose For many years, the financial industry has been perceived as conservative, old‐fashioned, and somewhat tedious. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of humour usage by financial advisors on several sales performance outcomes. Design/methodology/approach A survey was completed by more than 400 buyer‐seller dyads. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses were conducted. An important strength of SEM is its ability to incorporate the psychometric notions of constructs and measurement errors in the same estimation procedure. Findings A financial advisor's good sense of humour has a positive impact on the clients' perceptions of service quality, trust, satisfaction, purchase intentions, and word‐of‐mouth propensity. Research limitations/implications Although only customer perceptions were used, the paper suggests many ways to use the results as a spring board by sales researchers to accrue research efforts in understanding the truly rich role of humour. Practical implications Many practical implications are suggested to entice organizations to emphasize salespeople's humouristic skills as a competitive advantage. Originality/value This is believed to be the first paper to investigate the effects of humour usage in sales encounters in the financial industry. A better understanding of humour is useful for service providers owing to its mass potential, its low cost, and its positive benefits for customers and financial advisors alike.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".