Personality traits, selling behaviors and their relationship with sales performance: Evidence from direct selling industry

This paper aims at investigating the relationship among direct sellers´ personality traits, sales behaviors and their performance. Based on data from questionnaire survey, a PLS-based structural equation model has been developed. The results demonstrate that both adaptive selling behavior and canned selling behavior have positive influence on selling performance. Furthermore, we find that conscientiousness has a direct influence on selling performance while adaptive selling behavior mediates the relationship between extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and selling performance. Other personality traits have no significant influence on selling performance. One managerial implication of this paper is that under current environment, the performance of Chinese direct sellers may rely on guanxi in some extent.