The effect of emotional intelligence on salesperson's behavior and customers' perceived service quality

This study discusses salespersons' emotional intelligence, one of the key abilities necessary to meet customers' needs effectively, and express positive emotions in frequent interactions with customer. Emotional intelligence refers to self-controllability and social ability emphasizing pro-social aspect and understanding of others. This study investigates how salespersons' emotional intelligence affects adaptive selling and positive emotional expression during the process of interaction with customers, and how such adaptive selling and positive emotional expression affects the quality of service perceived by customers. The result shows that greater salespersons' emotional intelligence results in better adaptive selling and positive emotional expression. Such adaptive selling and positive emotional expression had significant effects on the quality of service perceived by customers. These results are important in that they address emotional intelligence as salespersons' emotional ability, which has been overlooked as an antecedent variable for improving adaptive selling and display of positive emotion, consequently provide another factor to help salespersons improve their selling behavior.