Personal selling effectiveness has become
fundamental to ensure the success of banking
institutions (Bernstel, 2001). Such organizations
need to embrace progressive talent strategies
if they are to be successful in enhancing the
selling prowess of their employees, thus
improving overall responsiveness to customers’
needs. This focus is not restricted to banking
firms and the growing significance of service
firms in modern economies underlines the
need for effective employee talent strategies
(Hartmann et al, 2010). Perception of quality
of a particular service provided depends in
part on customer’s approval of the emotions
being displayed by service providers (Abraham,
1999).
Although technology and systems ‘hardware’
are known to facilitate the provision of
positive service experiences, these can only
be as efficient as the service providers
employing them. Understanding customers
is challenging enough; understanding and
motivating employees is by no means any
less perplexing (Das and Mangaraj, 2012)
and getting this right is critical to effective
relationship building that so many banks seek
to foster in their pursuit of a sustainable
competitive advantage.
This study considers three principal human
resources (HR) ‘software’ components that are
known to be critical in any talent strategy
development, namely: emotional labor (EL),
equity sensitivity (ES) and organizational
commitment (OC). It also considers how links
among these three components affect the
personal selling prowess of customer service
bank managers and ultimately corporate
performance. These constructs are individually
considered and together they are used to
build a research model that investigates a
number of hypothesized relationships. Research
instruments are identified and data are collected
from among customer service managers
within a commercial bank. Results are
reported, implications are drawn, limitations
are noted and directions for future research
are indicated.