DIMENSIONS OF SALESMEN STEREOTYPES AND THEIR RELATION TO EXECUTIVE CHARACTERISTICS

In: Social science quarterly, Band 51, Heft 4, S. 959-967

Abstract

A study to determine if there was evidence to suggest association between the professional & personal characteristics of sales managers & their view of the good salesman. The good salesman stereotype was measured with semantic diff'ials selected (after discussion interviews with sales managers) from the bipolar adjective inventory of Osgood, Saci & Tannenbaum THE MEASUREMENT OF MEANING (Urbana, Ill: U of Illinois Press, 1957). Characteristics of sales managers included: (1) age, (2) yrs experience in manag position, (3) yrs of formal educ, & (4) professional participation. 2 industries were surveyed via direct mail; these were (a) the brewing industry & (b) the Coll textbook publishing industry. In the early stages of the study executives were personally interviewed & asked to describe their concept of a good salesman. From these discussions, a questionaire was constructed & submitted to random samples of purchasing & sales executives in each industry. Response was slightly over 40% for the brewing industry. After editing & discarding incomplete & unusable J's, there were 114 & 57 M's returned from the publishing group & 57 from the brewing industry (also, 104 from sales managers & 67 from the purchasing agents). Bipolar adjectives were factor analyzed & rotated, giving new dimensions of the good salesman. Canonical r was performed between executive characteristics (the predictor set of variables) & GSS stereotype scores. From both analyses, new concepts of what the good salesman is & what affects how he is viewed emerged. AA.