The effect of managerial coaching on salesperson's relationship behaviors: new evidence from frontline bank employees in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of the study is to test the effect of relationship managerial behavior (i.e. managerial coaching) on frontline employee performance (i.e. sales performance) and the mediating effect of employee's relationship behaviors (i.e. customer orientation and adaptive selling) in a Chinese banking environment. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected using a survey from 242 frontline employees working at a large commercial bank in Dalian (China). Measures on managerial coaching, customer orientation, adaptive selling and sales performance were adapted from the literature. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS 26. Findings Results indicate that (1) managerial coaching positively affects employee customer orientation, (2) employee customer orientation positively affects employee adaptive selling behavior and (3) adaptive selling behavior positively affects sales performance. Bootstrap analysis confirmed the significance and stability of all the direct paths (suggesting that every mediator fully mediates the effect of its antecedent on the criterion) but none of the indirect paths found support (full mediation model). Research limitations/implications The study makes a contribution to the nomological network of managerial coaching by introducing a construct that has not been used previously (i.e. employee adaptive selling behavior) and testing its relevance in a commercial setting. Practical implications The results suggest that (1) managerial coaching is a central managerial behavior for companies that would like to implement a relationship marketing strategy because it helps promote specific employee relationship behaviors like customer orientation and adaptive selling, (2) there seems to be little cultural differences in the banking industry between the Chinese and the Western banks, suggesting that coaching and other management tools can be transferable from one culture to the other and (3) that coaching is an effective tool to help employees achieve higher sales performance. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature on the use of managerial coaching in commercial areas to increase frontline employee relationships behaviors. The identification of adaptive selling as a mediator is an original contribution because it has received little attention in scientific research. Additionally, the use of a Chinese sample of bank employees responds to recent call for more research in cross-cultural settings.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".