Exploring the impact of social undermining on salesperson deviance: An integrated model

Abstract

While most scholars debate the importance of doing things to improve the quality of the buyer–seller relationship and investigate the positive side of salesperson’s behavior, little is known about salesperson’s negative behavior or what causes it. In this study, social undermining theory is employed to investigate how a variety of social undermining behaviors influence salesperson deviant behavior. A sample of 469 frontline bank employees responded to a questionnaire. Structural equation modeling and moderated regression were used to test the model, which produced results suggesting that various types of social undermining affect deviant behavior by influencing employee emotional exhaustion. The results also show that salesperson motivation moderates the effect of emotional exhaustion on deviant behavior. © 2013 PSE National Educational Foundation. All rights reserved.