Can salesperson guilt lead to more satisfied customers? Findings from India Colin B. Gabler Department of Marketing, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA Raj Agnihotri College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA, and Omar S. Itani Department of Hospitality Management and Marketing, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate guilt proneness as a prosocial salesperson trait and its impact on outcomes important to the firm, the customer as well as the salesperson. Specifically, the authors look at how this variable relates to job effort and the indirect effects on customer satisfaction. The corollary purpose is to uncover how managers influence these constructs through positive outcome feedback. Design/methodology/approach – Prosocial motivation theory grounds the conceptual model which the authors test through survey implementation. The final sample consisted of 129 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople working across multiple industries in India. Latent moderated structural equation modeling was utilized to test the proposed model. Findings – The results suggest that guilt proneness positively influences the likelihood that a salesperson adopts a relational orientation, which has a direct effect on individual effort and an indirect effect on customer satisfaction. Supervisors have the ability to amplify this effort through positive outcome feedback, but only when relational orientation is low. Their support had no effect on salespeople with a high relational orientation. Originality/value – The study is unique in that it combines an overlooked prosocial trait with a B2B Indian dataset. We provide value for firms because our results show that guilt-prone salespeople put more effort into their job – ”something universally desirable among sales managers” – through the development of a relational orientation. The authors also give practical implications on how to support salespeople given their level of relational orientation. Keywords Customer satisfaction, Effort, Guilt proneness, Positive outcome feedback, Prosocial motivation theory, Relational orientation Paper type Research paper [. . .] guilt can be understood in relationship contexts as a factor that strengthens social bonds by eliciting symbolic affirmation of caring and commitment (Baumeister et al., 1994). Introduction The development of long-term customer relationships is a fundamental goal of today’s salesforces. Not only has the salesperson’s job changed radically (Gonzalez et al., 2014), but the function of sales managers has transformed as well. The new strategy is to hire and train salespeople to effectively interact with customers, gather and interpret information, and create solutions to sustain these relationships (Ramani and Kumar, 2008). Researchers are increasingly interested in determining variables that affect customer–salesperson relationships, specifically customer satisfaction (Ahearne et al., 2007; Zallocco et al., 2009). Scholars point to numerous components that greatly impact the quality of these relationships. We focus on three of the most influential: interpersonal characteristics, relational aspects and supervisor behaviors (Parsons, 2002; Rapp et al., 2006). Salesperson performance, in particular, relies on the specific array of an individual’s interpersonal characteristics (Aggarwal et al., 2005; Homburg and Stock, 2005). For this reason, Jones et al. (2003, p. 330) has called for scholars to focus on “interpersonal process attributes of the total market offering”, as they can serve as “significant determinants of the customer’s level of customer satisfaction”. Still, the literature on salesperson interpersonal traits is limited (Belschak et al., 2006; Verbeke et al., 2004; Verbeke and Bagozzi, 2000). One such trait which has been specifically mentioned in the literature is the prosocial disposition of guilt proneness (Agnihotri et al., 2012a). We answer this call and position it as the focal construct in our study, and then add a key relational aspect and supervisory behavior to our model. In addition to responding to this important research gap, we advance two main contributions. First, we consider the counterintuitive notion that guilt proneness could actually be a “good thing” for salespeople. We examine how this personal characteristic leads to relational orientation, which fosters higher levels of job effort. Ultimately, we test how this impacts customer satisfaction, an increasingly relevant performance indicator (Agnihotri et al., 2009; Hunter and Perreault, 2006; The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0885-8624.htm Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing 32/7 (2017) 951–961 © Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 0885-8624] [DOI 10.1108/JBIM-12-2016-0287] Received 16 December 2016 Revised 27 March 2017 Accepted 30 March 2017 951