Leadership Moderating the Impact of Personality Traits on Sales Performance

Introduction

In the organizational behavior field, scholars have been always in the pursuit of forecasting and clarifying the factors triggering employees’ performance (Barrick et al., 2013; Hasan & Hassan, 2021). In doing so, many researchers tackled the employees’ personality traits (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000), and others highlighted the leadership styles that can effectively boost followers’ job performance (Derue et al., 2011; M. A. Griffin & Hu, 2013; Salman & Battour, 2020). More specifically, the leadership style and its impact on employees’ performance has been the focus of researchers in different countries, whether in Lebanon (Mattar, 2012; Mattar, 2016), Iran (Vatankhah et al., 2017), Vietnam (Ha & Nguyen, 2014), Germany (Braun et al., 2013), Taiwan (Chang et al., 2018), India, and in the insurance industry exclusively (Kumar, 2014) and other countries (MacKenzie et al., 2001). The same is true for the personality traits, as researchers studied their effects on sales performance (PERF) in different countries, such as Pakistan (Waheed et al., 2017) and Poland (Janowski, 2018). However, none shed light on the impact of personality traits on PERF in the Lebanese life insurance industry knowing that it is a vital one for the Lebanese economy; and none of the studies tackled the impact of the leadership style as a moderator between the personality traits and PERF. Therefore, this study fills a gap in the literature and enriches it, as it aims to detect the factors affecting the insurance sales agent’s performance, by examining the agent’s personality traits and by checking the moderator effect of the perceived unit manager’s leadership style on this relation.

The insurance sector is a vital part of any growing economy as it helps in maintaining a balanced system of risk transfer (Buckham et al., 2010). In Lebanon, the free economy has contributed to the development of the insurance sector that has witnessed a boom in the 1990’s after the civil war, and is still growing unexpectedly in the last few years. In 2015, Swiss Re (a leading provider of insurance) ranked Lebanon the first country in the Middle East and the 42^nd globally in terms of its penetration rate. In 2016, it was reported that 52 insurance companies in Lebanon generated $1.6 billion of gross written premium, which is equivalent to 3.08% penetration rate (premiums relative to the size of the economy). These figures have classified Lebanon among the top ranked countries, not only in the Middle East but at a global scale as well.

In this research, the authors selected a leading insurance company, established in more than 50 countries and offering several insurance products, with more than 100 million customers around the world. As of 2019, it was the number one company in Life insurance with a 17% market share of the Lebanese insurance industry.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section two reviews the academic literature and discusses the hypotheses development. The third section describes the questionnaire, the sample, and the model followed by data presentation in Section four. Section five discusses the findings and Section six concludes the paper.