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Hard Work Beats Talent, Unless Talent Works Hard: Exploring The Relationship Between Self-Efficacy And Sales Performance, Mohammad Sakif Amin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Current research in sales suggests that salesperson self-efficacy, which is a person’s belief about his/her ability to achieve a desired level of performance in a given task, affects sales performance positively. The logic behind this positive effect is that people who exhibit a high level of self-efficacy have increased motivation and thus exert increased efforts towards completing a task. Research in psychology, however, suggests that there can be a downside to self-efficacy. Drawing on perceptual control and ego depletion theories, this dissertation explores two possible dark side effects of self-efficacy in a sales context: (1) decreased salesperson effort engendered by …