Scott B. MacKenzie, Philip M. Podsakoff, & Richard Fetter The Impact of Organizational Citizenship Behavior on Evaluations of Salesperson Performance The research objective was to examine the relative impact of "organizational citizenship behaviors" (OeBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers' evaluations of the performance of their sales per- sonnel. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for three diverse sales samples: (1) 261 multiline insurance agents, (2) 204 petrochemical sales representatives, and (3) 108 district sales man- agers working for a large pharmaceutical company. Managerial evaluations of organizational citizenship behavior and overall performance were also obtained for each of these people. The results indicate that (1) managers do recognize several different dimensions of "citizenship" behavior, and these OeBs are distinct from objective sales productivity, (2) the combination of OeBs and objective sales productivity accounts for substantially more variance in managers' overall evaluations than typically is accounted for by sales productivity alone, and (3) the OeBs (taken as a group) consistently account for a larger portion of the variance in managerial evaluations than does sales productivity. The implications of these findings for salesforce motivation and evaluation are discussed. A CCORDING to one of the most widely held def- initions, salesperson "performance" is " ... be- havior evaluated in terms of its contribution to the goals of the organization. Performance, in other words, has a normative element reflecting whether a salesper- son's behavior is 'good' or 'bad' in light of the or- ganization's goals and objectives" (Churchill, Ford, and Walker 1990, p. 729, italics added). Because "performance" represents a salesperson's overall con- tribution to the success of an organization, it is not surprising that it has received considerable attention in the marketing literature (see Churchill et al. 1985). Nor is it surprising that sales managers base many of their most important decisions (e.g., promotions, transfers, compensation, providing feedback, select- Scott B. MacKenzie is Associate Professor of Marketing and Philip M. Podsakoff is Professor of Personnel and Organizational Behavior, Indi- ana University. Richard Fetter is a doctoral candidate, Graduate School of Business, Indiana University. 70 / Journal of Marketing, January 1993 ing training programs for salespeople, and making ter- minations) on their overall evaluations of the perfor- mance of their sales personnel. When evaluating their sales personnel, many man- agers rely on objective sales productivity (e.g., dollar sales volume and percentage of quota) as the principal indicator of a salesperson's performance (Churchill, Ford, and Walker 1990; Dubinsky and Barry 1982). However, sales productivity is not the only factor they consider. In many circumstances, sales managers also take into account other aspects of a salesperson's be- havior that, in their judgment, make a contribution to the effective functioning of the organization (Darden and French 1970; Dubinsky and Barry 1982; Jackson, Keith, and Schlacter 1983; Patton and King 1985). I 'Evidence of the extent to which managers consider more than just objective sales productivity when evaluating salesperson performance is provided by studies asking sales managers to report the criteria they use (Darden and French 1970; Dubinsky and Barry 1982; Jackson, Keith, and Schlacter 1983) and studies comparing objective measures Journal of Marketing Vol. 57 (January 1993). 70-80