How can managers promote salespeople’s person-job fit? The effects of cooperative learning and perceived organizational support

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the impact of salespeople’s subjective person-job fit on the salespeople’s intention to quit. Moreover, this study further investigates how the subjective person

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job fit could be influenced by the cooperative learning and support in the organization. Person-job fit is an important issue for salespeople’s career development. However, the antecedents of salespeople’s person-job fit seem to have been under-investigated in the management literature.

Design/methodology/approach

A questionnaire survey is used as a research instrument, and Taiwan’s full-time life insurance salespeople took part in the investigation. The hypotheses were tested by using partial least squares and structural equation modeling tool (SmartPLS 2.0).

Findings

The results confirmed that poor subjective person-job fit would significantly increase the salespeople’s intention to quit. Yet, the results also suggested that cooperative learning and organizational support are the mechanisms that reduce this problem.

Originality/value

This study provided the initial discussions about the effect of cooperative learning and organizational support on the salespeople’s subjective person-job fit.

Citation

Tseng, L.-M. and Yu, T.-W. (2016), "How can managers promote salespeople’s person-job fit? The effects of cooperative learning and perceived organizational support", The Learning Organization, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-03-2015-0023