Researchers prescribe that the combined influence of personal characteristics and work conditions should be examined to provide a clearer understanding of predictors of performance. This study investigates the joint impact of salespeople’s external work locus of control (WLOC) and a firm’s ethical climate on job meaningfulness, job performance and turnover intentions. The study hypotheses were tested with a sample of 151 business-tobusiness salespeople from a sales organization based in the southeastern United States. The results of the study suggest that when salespeople perceive that their sales organization has a strong ethical climate, the negative impact of external WLOC is mitigated based on the salesperson’s feelings of job meaningfulness, resulting in positive job performance and fewer turnover intentions. Implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are provided.

Introduction

Sales managers are most concerned with the job performance and retention of their salesforce. This concern is understandable, since U.S. firms annually spend an estimated $15 billion in training salespeople for better performance. This investment in training becomes questionable when industry estimates place the turnover of U.S. salespeople at approximately 27%, which is two times that of the overall labor force (Harvard Business Review, 2017). The interest in identifying predictors of performance and turnover intentions has led to numerous studies (Schrock, Hughes, Fu, Richards, & Jones, 2016). Early meta-analyses found that skill, situational factors, personal factors, and aptitude are some of the important predictors of salesperson performance (Churchill, Ford, Hartley, & Walker, 1985; Vinchur, Schippmann, Switzer, & Roth, 1998). The Vinchur et al. (1998) meta-analysis assessed the impact of the Big Five personality dimensions and found that two of the dimensions, namely, extraversion and conscientiousness, were critical predictors of job performance. Recently, researchers noted that to obtain a better understanding of work outputs and their predictors, the joint influence of personal dispositions and work situations must be considered (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013). In one study, the authors state, “it is difficult to think of an instance of employee behavior that cannot be better understood by considering the joint influence of these two sets of factors” (Barrick et al., 2013, p. 133).