Adaptive Selling and Customer Orientation as Mediators Between Managerial Coaching and Performance: A Chinese Study: An Abstract

Abstract

China’s banking industry has undergone important changes since the Chinese economic reform and its admission into the World Trade Organization. An increasing competitive market revealed that Chinese banks face important challenges and that using managerial relationship behaviours can be instrumental in helping Chinese banks implement relationship strategies and be more successful in the marketplace.

In a marketing relationship context there might be synergy when managers adopt specific managerial relationship behaviors – like managerial coaching – to promote specific salespeople relationship behaviors – like customer orientation (CO) and adaptive selling (AS). Accordingly, our study tests the effect of managerial coaching on salesperson’s performance and the mediating effect of CO and AS in a Chinese environment.

We used a non-experimental design and collected data using a convenience sample of salespeople from a large bank in Dalian (China). We received 242 complete answers (response rate: 69.14%) with 61.6% of female respondents. The sample presented an average age of 34 years with an average selling experience of 6 years. We used existing scales from the literature and a Chinese version of them that have already been used in a previous study. The scales presented high reliability, as well as convergent and discriminant validity. The measurement model fit the data well.

Results indicate that managerial coaching has a positive and significant impact on customer orientation, customer orientation on adaptive selling, and adaptive selling on salesperson performance, suggesting a full mediation model: CO fully mediates the effect of managerial coaching on AS and performance, and AS fully mediates the effects of coaching and CO on performance. This is an interesting result, as other studies normally present a significant path between coaching and performance – additional to the mediating path under study – suggesting that in a sales context coaching influences performance through many different mediators. In our case (i.e. a credence service) it seems that CO and AS are so important to develop long-term trustful relationships with the customers and eventually sales performance, that the potential effect of other mediators is diminished.

The study makes a contribution to the literature in relationship managerial behaviors concerning the similarity of results with studies using Western samples: managerial coaching seems to be an effective tool to promote salespeople relationship behaviors and improve their performance, suggesting that cultural differences – between Western and Asian respondents – might be less salient in an industry with global players that compete globally.