판매원의 감정지능과 탈진감 및 고객 지향적 판매행동의 관계에 관한 연구

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study, unlike the previous studies related to salespersons, focuses on a salesperson’semotional factors such as emotional intelligence and burnout as determinants of his/her selling behavior. In particular, it emphasizes emotional intelligence as a major factor that makes salespersons suffer less burnout in their interaction with customers. The prior studies related to burnout have focused on the causes, suggesting personal factors(personality, daily living), customer factors(the number of customers and the frequency of contact), and working environment factors(excessive demands from organizations and people, overwork, lack of self-regulation, ambiguity of roles, and conflicts among roles). These causes, however, can be uncontrollable factors for salespersons or inevitable factors due to the job of the salesperson. Therefore burnout is so common a phenomenon for salespersons that it would be difficult for organizations to find and eradicate the causes and to reduce burnout levels among salespersons. This study will present emotional intelligence, a kind of personal characteristics, as a possible variable of reducing burnout that salespersons have obliged to suffer. Emotional intelligence is defined as an ability to perceive and control his/her emotions, motivate oneself, understand others and maintain good interpersonal relationships, an ability to self-control stressingsocial-friendliness among the properties of human emotion including the ability to understand self and others and empathy with others. If individuals have higher level of emotion intelligence, they will more likely to deal with negative psychological phenomena in interaction with customers. In addition to one’s acquiring diverse knowledge on sales, one’s ability to deal with social conflicts, address emotional problems, and have a flexible way of thinking can be more important qualifications for salespersons that help to meet the demand of customers well and show their ability to work.The findings suggest that a salesperson’s emotional intelligence serves as the factor that reduce his/her burnout in the process of sales, demonstrating that the decrease or increase of burnout has a significant impact on a salesperson’s selling behavior. This implies that to induce positive behavior from salespeople who have suffered negative psychological phenomena because of frequent interaction with customers, it is important for organizations to train and manage employees to have higher emotional intelligence such as the ability to perceive and control their emotion, to motivate themselves, to understand others, and to maintain goodinterpersonal relationships, as well as knowledge training on works. In other words, a salesperson’s emotional ability as well as his/her selling knowledge is a key element for his/her ability to meet demands from customers. Therefore, emotional intelligence, an emotional ability to deal with and adapt to various customer interaction, is a key variable, even though a salesperson has suffered burnout in a process of interaction with customers. So decreased burnout has a consequence on a salesperson’s selling behavior.This study highlights the importance of a salesperson’s emotional ability and emotional phenomenon, and provides a guideline to the recruitment and training of salespersons.