Does B2B salespeople’s love of money attitude mediate the relationships between a growth mindset, a fixed mindset, grit, and job performance?
Abstract
Purpose
To most people, money is a motivator, which is robustly true for salespeople. A high love of money attitude predicts university students’ poor academic performance in a business course and cheating in laboratory experiments and multiple panel studies, but money (income) itself does not predict dishonesty. Extrinsic reward undermines intrinsic motivation. Very little research has incorporated the grit construct in the sales literature and explored the relationship between grit and the love of money. Further, a growth mindset and a fixed mindset may also impact salespeople’s job performance. This study aims to explore a brand-new theoretical structural equation model (SEM) and investigate the relationships between individual characteristics (growth and fixed mindsets and grit orientation) and job performance directly and indirectly through a mediator – salespeople’s love of money attitude.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses Qualtrics and collects data from 330 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople across several industries in the USA. This study uses a formative SEM model to test this study’s hypotheses.
Findings
First, there are significant correlations among grit, a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, revealing no construct duplication or redundancy. Second, both a growth mindset and grit indirectly enhance job performance through the love of money attitude – a mediator, offering a brand-new discovery. Third, counter-intuitively, a growth mindset and grit do not directly improve job performance. Fourth, grit is significantly and negatively related to the love of money attitude, adding a new twist to this study’s theoretical model. Fifth, a fixed mindset undermines job performance directly but is unrelated to the love of money. Overall, B2B salespeople’s love of money attitude (employee demand) undermines sales personnel’s self-reported job performance (organization demand) in the organization and employee’s supply and demand exchange relationship.
Originality/value
The findings reveal that a growth mindset, a fixed mindset and grit contribute differently to sales personnel’s love of money attitude and job performance in this study’s theoretical model. The love of money serves as a mediator. A commonly accepted belief is that money is a motivator. Money (income) itself and the love of money attitude are two separate constructs. This study’s novel discoveries provide the essential missing monetary-aspirations-to-job-performance link in the literature – ardent monetary aspiration undermines self-reported job performance. This study offers inspiration to help decision-makers make happy, healthy and wealthy decisions and improve performance.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
We thank three Guest Editors of this special issue, Professors Lucy Matthews, Diane Edmondson, and Ryan Matthews, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, insightful suggestions, and valuable comments in helping us improve the presentation of our research findings and Toto Sutarso for his assistance.
Ethical approval: Researchers followed the institutional and/or national research committee’s ethical standards and the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent: We obtained informed consent from all individuals in the study.
Conflict of interest: All authors declare no conflict of interest.
Citation
Iyer, P., Nikolov, A.N., Stewart, G.T., Srivastava, R.V. and Tang, T. (2024), "Does B2B salespeople’s love of money attitude mediate the relationships between a growth mindset, a fixed mindset, grit, and job performance?", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-02-2023-0069
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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