ROLE OF MOTIVATION AND ITS EFFECT ON SALES FORCE PERFORMANCE (A CASE STUDY OF NICON INSURANCE LTD, ABUJA)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Self-driven employees are the real blessings to the organizations, which is now a fact of rarest of the rare in most of the industries. This calls for the discussion of organizations’ effort to drive the employees as a whole towards their performance, ultimately towards organizational achievements. So the study of motivation forms an integral part of industrial and vocational psychology in which the concepts of need, incentive and attitude are discussed extensively than the concepts of ability and skill (Vroom, 2015). Not only the industries, the academicians & researchers worried a lot to get a concrete result regarding these aspects.

Sales force motivation holds an important place in marketing and sales literature. Several studies focused on exploring the antecedents of sales force motivation. According to Walker, Churchill and Ford (1977), salesman’s motivation to expend effort on the job and his resulting performance are a function of following variables: (1) the aptitude or ability of the salesman, (2) financial compensation and incentives, (3) psychological incentives, and (4) organizational and managerial factors. Motivation is a psychological state that initiates and guides a person’s behaviour or conscious choices (Brown & Peterson, 1994). The two broad categories of motivation are: Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. As the competition is increasing day by day, more and more firms are trying to distinguish themselves from others. In such a case, sales people motivation plays a very important role.

So their sales force wastes valuable time in scrutinizing & disputing their pay checks realizing their compensation payments as slow & inaccurate. To know about employees’ preferences of what motivates them could help improving productivity and building success story for the organizations. If motivation is the underlying cause of performance problem, then its solution becomes more complex and challenging (Griffin, 2010).

The sales people’s performance in marketing is to create a sustainable competitive advantage against competitor (Hossain, Sultana & Mazmum, 2016; Dey et al., 2016). Tai, Huang and Chuang (2016) argued that sales representatives’ impression of their manager part demonstrate conduct related emphatically to confide in the business director and related by implication, through trust, to both job satisfaction and overall performance of the sales people in the business organization. According to Terho, Eggert, Haas and Ulaga (2015), the administration part of sales managers is so imperative. Administrators play a significant part in embellishment practices and state of mind of their sales people (Mulki, Jaramillo, Goad and Pesquera, 2015). Marks and Badovick (2015) contended that sales people adapt sales message to the individual consumer’s need and this has long been acknowledged as the advantage of personal selling over other methods of communication.

Accordingly, in the face of the competitive performance environment and the fast extension of essential scope of products and the need to sell in better approaches to new clients place (Lu, Yueh and Lin, 2016), thus, sales people performance is essential to perform the organizational task efficiently (Hossain et al., 2016). In addition, enhancing sales people performance through sales force inspiration is a developing issue in insurance sector (Dutt, 2015).

Additionally, sales people’s performance is vital for organizations (Rahman et al., 2014) since they deal with imperative finance, product or item and client information which could simply be exchanged starting with one organization and then the next. Along these lines, sales people’s performance and responsibility to the association are basic variable in the long haul achievement of the organizations (Buciuniene and Skudiene, 2015). Empirical studies (Payne et al., 2013) show that sales representatives’ maintenance prompts expanded sales quality and in this manner, expanded sales. Moreover, sales people’s performance is important to the future growth and success of all industry (Magandini and Ngwenya, 2015). Developing advances revolutionizes business sector needs making it troublesome for clients to articulate their future needs and prerequisites. Organizations require huge assets and specialized aptitudes to keep up a focused advantage (Magandini and Ngwenya, 2015).

Sales force is no longer what they had been perceived to be over the years. They were formally known to be aggressively mandated people, projected to make money for the companies they represent with little or no care to customer satisfaction and retention. Okolo, Uzor, Anuforo, Obikeze, Nebo and Okafor (2015) remark that there is a new paradigm shift as sales force have become need identifiers and problem solvers and or solution providers. The sales force assiduously works to establish a win-win situation with their various customers instead of exploiting them. This eventually establishes, and harbours a mutually sustainable relationship between them (Kotler and Bowen, 2010). Salespeople need to be judiciously recruited and selected to ensure a firm’s successful operation in a competitive market (Abdolvand and Farzaneh, 2013). To compete in today’s global markets, organizations strive to deliver their products (physical) and services (intangible) in both an efficient and effective manner. In service supply chain, human labour forms a significant component of the value chain and physical handling of a product leads to standardized and centralized procedures and controls in manufacturing supply chains (Sengupta, et al., 2018). The focus of efficiencies in service supply chains is on management of capacity, flexibility of resources, information flows, service performance and cash flow management. Critical factors include demand management, customer relationship management and supplier relationship management in manufacturing supply chains and service supply chains. Sales force in any company – big or small, manufacturing or service, is charged with generating product sales from assigned customer accounts in independent territories (Uduji and Onwumere, 2013). However, the evolving selling environment today is much more complex, demanding significant changes in performance metrics, goals, control and compensation.

In this context, driving (motivating) such employees is a big challenge for the organization now and will be remained so in the near future. So far as retention of talents & organizational targets are concerned, a major dimension in such organizational overall productivity is attributed to the sales force productivity. High productivity in a sales force comes neither naturally nor accidentally. It has been found out that sales force motivation has an impact on salesperson and organizational performance.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Customers are more demanding today than ever before (Kotler and Armstrong, 2012). The target market requires better goods, services and quick and reliable support than they had in the past. The sales force in the field have some wealth of knowledge and experience about the products, market, competitors, industry trends, do not seem to be active and effective as exemplified by failure to keep business promises, giving incorrect information to customers, and poor customer relationship management. Specifically, greater percentage of the sales force in manufacturing and service companies have been major culprits in these practices including lateness to work and not keeping appointment at all. Others could be very unfriendly and even become hostile while attending to customers. Sales force lose focus and consequently supply wrong brand of products to customers. These result in long waiting time for customers to receive the needed goods and services, and the consequent low performance as some customers lose patience and consequently take their leave and even go the alternatives; competing products and companies. The poor attitudes of the sales force such as lateness to work, delayed sales calls, lack of information for customers problems, could contribute to the low growth of sales force performance in manufacturing and service companies. The foregoing situations of the sales force in manufacturing and service companies in relation to economic performance raise issues on whether these companies can achieve and sustain high rates of output and growth, capable of generating and sustaining large numbers of employees; and whether they can compete effectively in the global market. The failure of sales force could have industrial, managerial and marketing implications which this study is set to explore, and which constitutes its research problem. Particularly in the context of how the sales force are motivated towards improving productivity using the incentives of salaries, sales calls allowances, sales bonuses, access to sales vans, product availability and continuous training and updating of the sales force. One of the motivationally challenged occupations is the field-sales-force. The most frequently discussed question regarding these employees is that “what propels (motivate) the field sales force to perform more & more?” And the likely answers are salary, incentives, bonus; good work environment, conducive work culture, manager-subordinate relationship and many more in this regard have been explored. But do these factors really act upon the performance of the sales force or do these factors manifest the motivation, which ultimately direct the performance of the sales force?. Till now there is very little ground to confirm the answers of these questions in the pharmaceutical industry. Thus the precise problem statement of the current research is being posed as “does motivation has an effect on performance of Nicon insurance LTD sales force?”

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The general objective of the study is to examine the role of motivation and its effect on sales force performance. The specific objectives of this study include the following:

1. To determine the prevalence of sales force motivation in Nicon Insurance Ltd
2. To examine the factors that affects the motivational need of sales person in Nicon Insurance Ltd
3. To examine the effect of motivation on sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd
4. To examine if motivation influence behavioural performance of the sales forces in Nicon Insurance Ltd
5. To examine the relationship between motivation and sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd
6. To ascertain the influence of motivation on the job satisfaction of the sales forces in Nicon Insurance Ltd

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTION

1. What is the prevalence of sales force motivation in Nicon Insurance Ltd?
2. What are the factors that affect the motivational need of sales person in Nicon Insurance Ltd?
3. What is the effect of motivation on sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd?
4. How does motivation influence behavioural performance of the sales forces in Nicon Insurance Ltd?
5. What is the relationship between motivation and sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd?
6. What is the influence of motivation on the job satisfaction of the sales forces in Nicon Insurance Ltd?

1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS

Hypothesis 1

H1: There is no significant effect of motivation on sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd.

H0: There is a significant effect of motivation on sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd.

Hypothesis 2

HO: There is no significant relationship between motivation and sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd

H1: There is a significant relationship between motivation and sales force performance in Nicon Insurance Ltd

1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study through motivation intended to investigate the job satisfaction of the sales force at the Nicon Insurance Ltd, Abuja by focusing on incentives and motivation scheme. However the findings of this study will be significant in the following areas:-

Firstly, as there has not been any research done to this company, or at least literature is missing significantly on the attitude of the workforce; then it will be vitally appropriate for the stakeholders for improvement and learning experience

Secondly, the study will provoke focal areas whereby necessary impetus needs to be injected for the best achievement. Thirdly, the study will inspire the interest of the society and users for options and alternative way of improving organizational performance.

Lastly not least, the study will help as an advice to the Company policy maker of focal areas, whereas the findings may be utilized in their change management program

1.7 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The title of this work clearly indicates the area of study. The issues that will be examined here is role of motivation and its effect of sales force performance, a case study of Nicon Insurance Ltd, Abuja.

1.8 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

The limitation of time and other resources on the part of the researcher make it impossible to embark on a comparative study of similar organization at the same time. But it is true that the study will serve as a representative sample of similar researcher institution whose industries finding will generally accepted.

1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Motivation: Is an individual’s degree of willingness to exert and maintain an effort towards organizational goals or is “the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organizational goals, conditioned by the effort’s ability to satisfy some individual need.”

Incentives: Are reward and/or punishment that healthcare providers face from the organization in which they work and specific intervention they provide.

Intrinsic Motivation: Is an inducement derived from within the person or from the activity itself and, positively affects behavior, performance, and well-being.

Extrinsic Motivation: Is said to exist when behavior is performed for its own sake rather than to obtain material or social re-enforcers.

Management: Follet (2011) seems management as an act of getting things done through other people.