Personality and Sales Performance

Research in psychology and behavioral studies have shown that integrity validation by way of meta-analysis is important in predicting job performance and counterproductive job behaviors (Deniz, Chockalingam and Schmidt, 1993). Dependability testing for personnel selection is also routinely carried out by financial institutions and government agencies (Sackett, Burris and Callahan, 1989). The application of personality profiling for real estate salespeople is largely absent in the literature save for isolated work (see Brinkmann, 2009). Thus, the objective of this study is to carry out a personality profiling exercise for real estate salespeople in Singapore and coupled with their corresponding observable characteristics such as age, gender, qualifications, etc., to identify both an empirical and personality profile of successful real estate salespeople in Singapore. Using these results, we can further compare this profile with their Western counterparts to check if there are cross-cultural differences.The first phase of our study was carried out in December 2013. 185 respondents from one brokerage agency firm took our 16 PF test. Out of these respondents, 25% (47 pax) were identified to be in the Top 300 ranking in terms of sales performance. We are currently preparing to implement the second phase of our study for respondents from two other agency firms.In terms of methodology, we adopted the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) developed by Raymond Cattell. The idea is that we could better understand and predict human behavior using 16 narrow personality descriptors (such as warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, etc.) and 5 broader primary personality descriptors (such as extraversion, anxiety, independence, etc.). We were able to match the subject's personality indicators with observable characteristics (age, gender, education level, number of years with company and whether the salesperson joined from a different agency). We ran a probit model using a dummy indicator of one to identify the top salespeople (Top 300 ranking) as the dependent variable and the list of 16 narrow personality descriptors and observable characteristics as the explanatory variables.Our initial results indicate that in terms of observable characteristics, top salespeople tend to be younger, more educated, and have stayed with the company for a longer period of time. The last finding hints at a possible survivorship bias; that is, only performing sales