한국생산성학회

With the sales landscape of being dyadic, dynamic and uncertain, the salespersons are evaluating ways to better create and maintain their relationships with customers. Compared to customers in the past, customers have more relational power because they have access to an abundance of information through the SNS based internet. So, recently salespersons are expected to have a deep and complicated understanding of customer’s offers. However, it has been found that salesperson frequently do not meet those expectations, resulting in failure to offer the creative value to customer. Those failures lead to lower levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty to the salespersons. Further, some negative impact regarding the salesperson transfer to the selling firm, ultimately hurting a firm’s sales ability to compete in the marketplace. To reduce failures possibilities and increase positive outcomes of sales, salesperson must sincerely understand customer’s emotion and adapt their selling behavior throughout creative way. This research aims to examine how salesperson's empathy (i.e. cognitive empathy and emotional empathy) affects adaptive selling behavior, specifically the way salesperson's creativity(i.e. novelty and usefulness) at customer encounter increases their capability, and, it turn develops their adaptive selling behavior. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to show the mechanism by which both salesperson's cognitive and emotional empathy at customer encounter affects their adaptive selling behavior. Salespersons from a department store in South Korea were surveyed using a selfadministered instrument for data collection. Out of 310 questionnaire, a total of 250 usable questionnaires were obtained after list-wise deletion, for a 80.6 per cent response rate. All constructs were assessed by using items form established scales. The cognitive empathy scale consisted of three items, and the emotional empathy scale consisted of three items. The novelty and usefulness of salespersons was assessed by using a each four-item scale from Sok et al.(2018) and Wilder et al.(2014). Adaptive selling behavior was measured by seven-item scale developed by Sapiro and Weitz(1990). To test our research hypotheses, structural equation modeling was used. The results of this research suggest that salesperson's emotional empathy is positively related to novelty creativity and usefulness creativity, while cognitive empathy has no significant relationship with novelty creativity and usefulness creativity; Cognitive empathy is positively related to emotional empathy; Novelty creativity and usefulness creativity have significant relationship with adaptive selling behavior. The facts provides evidence that not all facets of empathy influence salespersons creativity the same way and differ in magnitude. This research attempts to develop an understanding of the underlying mechanism through which salesperson's empathy affects adaptative selling behavior through their creativity.