The Impact of Salespeople’s Attribution Biases on Job Satisfaction: The Concept of Unwarranted Satisfaction

Abstract

Keeping a high level of job satisfaction in the sales force is an essential prerequisite to ensuring sales force motivation and, consequently, high performance (Walker et al. 1977). One of the efficient ways to ensure job satisfaction is to enhance its antecedent. Drawing from the social and applied psychology, job satisfaction is determined by one’s psychological comparison between the perceived job experience and a reference point (Locke 1969; Rice et al. 1989; Weiss et al. 1999). Salespeople who are assigned sales objectives frequently experience a gap between these objectives and their actual performances. The perceived discrepancy between expected and actual performances is known to directly induce salespeople’s job satisfaction/dissatisfaction (JS/D) (Silvester et al. 2003). Specifically, the causal attributions to explain this discrepancy should be a major antecedent of a salesperson’s JS/D. However, sales managers have often overlooked this key antecedent of JS/D.