Salesperson Care for Company Property

1. Abstract

The Salesperson Care for Company Property scale is an observer-rated psychometric measurement tool developed by Molly R. Burchett, Brian R. Murtha, and Ajay K. Kohli (2023) to assess customer perceptions of the degree of stewardship, diligence, and respect a sales representative exhibits toward their employing firm’s physical assets, vehicles, demonstration units, digital equipment, and collateral materials during field interactions. Emerging from a multi-phase investigation into “secondary selling”—the psychological and behavioral mechanisms through which non-core, peripheral sales behaviors systematically influence primary customer evaluations—the scale captures an overlooked yet pivotal behavioral dimension within professional personal selling. Operationalized as a unidimensional instrument, the scale employs a multi-item, 7-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Across extensive laboratory experiments, cross-sectional industry surveys, and field validation studies involving industrial and business-to-consumer (B2C) customer cohorts, the scale demonstrates exceptional psychometric properties. Confirmatory factor analyses reveal high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha α ≥ .88; composite reliability [CR] ≥ .89) and robust convergent validity, evidenced by average variance extracted (AVE) values consistently exceeding .65. Discriminant validity is empirically substantiated against adjacent constructs including general salesperson competence, relational customer orientation, customer-directed empathy, and interpersonal warmth. By capturing the subtle behavioral signals sales professionals emit through physical asset management, this scale bridges organizational stewardship theory and customer attribution processes, providing researchers and commercial sales leadership with an empirically validated diagnostic tool for measuring indirect cues that drive relational trust, customer lifetime value, and organizational brand equity.

2. Keywords

Salesperson Care for Company Property, Secondary Selling, Stewardship Theory, Signaling Theory, Sales Psychometrics, Customer Attributions, Field Sales Equipment, Observer-Rated Scale, Perceived Competence, Customer Trust, Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

3. Authors

The scale was developed, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a research team specializing in personal selling, marketing strategy, and organizational behavior:

• Molly R. Burchett, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, College of Business, University of Wyoming (formerly doctoral candidate at the Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky). Dr. Burchett’s research centers on frontline employee interactions, interpersonal selling dynamics, and behavioral influence strategies.
• Brian R. Murtha, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky. Dr. Murtha is an authority on personal selling, sales management systems, boundary-spanning employee performance, and quantitative research methodologies.
• Ajay K. Kohli, Ph.D. — Gary T. and Virginia R. Jones Chair in Marketing and Professor of Marketing, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Kohli is a distinguished scholar widely renowned for his seminal contributions to market orientation, sales management, and foundational marketing theory.

4. Purpose

In traditional personal selling scholarship, research has overwhelmingly prioritized direct, task-oriented behaviors executed within the direct salesperson–customer dyad. Decades of literature have focused almost exclusively on needs discovery, adaptive selling, objection handling, closing techniques, and direct customer-oriented empathy. However, modern business-to-business (B2B) and high-involvement business-to-consumer (B2C) exchanges rarely occur in a sterile vacuum of pure verbal rhetoric. Instead, commercial encounters are saturated with tangible artifacts: product demonstration machinery, digital diagnostic tablets, presentation hardware, diagnostic testing kits, and company service vehicles. The primary purpose of the Salesperson Care for Company Property scale is to provide a rigorous, theoretically anchored instrument designed to quantify an external observer’s (specifically, a client or prospect’s) perception of how a frontline representative treats their organization’s material resources.

Burchett, Murtha, and Kohli (2023) identified that customer evaluations are deeply influenced by “secondary selling” behaviors—actions that are not explicitly directed at persuading the customer, but nonetheless communicate diagnostic information regarding the salesperson’s underlying character, conscientiousness, and reliability. When a sales representative carelessly tosses expensive demonstration equipment, mishandles company-provided tablets, leaves proprietary presentation cases scratched and dirty, or drives a poorly maintained, battered commercial fleet vehicle, customers do not view these actions as isolated technical mishaps. Rather, via fundamental attribution mechanisms, customers interpret asset mistreatment as an indicator of broader organizational indiscipline, poor work ethic, lack of personal integrity, and eventual negligence in client account servicing.

Conversely, when a representative handles company equipment with precision, cleans demonstration units meticulously before and after use, protects proprietary software hardware, and showcases exemplary stewardship of company resources, customers infer latent conscientiousness, operational excellence, and organizational respect. The clinical and research applications of the scale are diverse: it enables organizational psychologists to evaluate boundary-spanning employee fidelity; allows sales researchers to measure spillover effects in multi-party service blueprints; and equips corporate sales trainers to design empirical interventions targeting ambient, non-verbal cues that quietly undermine or elevate high-stakes negotiation outcomes.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct measured by this instrument—Salesperson Care for Company Property—is defined as the extent to which an external observer (typically a buyer, prospect, or client) perceives that a sales professional treats, maintains, and safeguards the physical, technological, and collateral assets owned by their employing organization with high levels of mindfulness, respect, and protective diligence.

Psychologically, the construct resides at the intersection of observed organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), boundary-spanning stewardship, and interpersonal nonverbal signaling. Although manifested through physical interactions with inanimate objects, the construct reflects a socio-cognitive judgment formed in the mind of the buyer. It encompasses multiple distinct behavioral facets:

• Physical Diligence and Handling: The observable tactile gentleness, procedural accuracy, and intentionality displayed when unpacking, manipulating, operating, and repacking commercial tools, sample kits, testing apparatuses, or mobile digital workstations.
• Preventive Maintenance and Cleanliness: The apparent cleanliness, structural preservation, and functional upkeep of enterprise tools, preventing premature degradation, aesthetic wear, or technical dysfunction in front of third-party stakeholders.
• Respect for Organizational Capital: The implicit behavioral acknowledgment that enterprise property represents valuable collective investment, reflecting an internal psychological commitment to protect corporate resources rather than treating them as disposable or expendable corporate overhead.

For example, consider an industrial sales engineer demonstrating a $45,000 optical spectrometry sensor to a plant manager. Under high levels of Care for Company Property, the sales engineer places protective foam matting on the workbench, calibrates the delicate lens using specialized micro-fiber garments, avoids setting heavy notebooks on the chassis, and secures the instrument into a custom molded transport case upon completion. Conversely, low levels of the construct are manifested when the sales engineer drops the case abruptly onto a concrete floor, yanks cords forcefully from socket ports, wipes optical glass with a soiled shirt sleeve, or dismisses minor cosmetic fractures on the casing with casual indifference. The psychological construct captures the holistic judgment made by the client regarding these ambient operational cues.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Salesperson Care for Company Property scale draws predominantly from three conceptual pillars: Signaling Theory, Attribution Theory, and Organizational Stewardship Theory.

Signaling Theory

Originally formulated in economics by Michael Spence (1973) and widely extended into organizational behavior, signaling theory posits that under conditions of information asymmetry, parties rely on observable, costly, or diagnostic behaviors (signals) to infer unobservable qualities or intentions of an agent. In commercial purchasing environments, prospective buyers suffer from substantial information asymmetry regarding how diligently a supplier will fulfill post-sale contractual promises, manage operational emergencies, and handle proprietary client assets. A salesperson’s direct verbal claims (“We guarantee flawless support and care for your facilities”) are often discounted as cheap talk. However, observing how a salesperson naturally treats their own employer’s property serves as a high-fidelity, diagnostic behavioral signal. Because individuals typically treat their own or their employer’s assets in alignment with their chronic internal standards of conscientiousness, the buyer treats physical care as an authentic signal of future operational reliability.

Attribution Theory

Fritz Heider’s (1958) foundation of social attribution and Harold Kelley’s (1967) covariation model illustrate how humans act as intuitive psychologists, seeking to attribute stable internal dispositions (traits) to external behaviors. When a customer observes a salesperson acting carelessly with organizational assets, they rarely attribute this failure purely to external situational constraints (e.g., “The salesperson was just in a hurry”). Instead, through the fundamental attribution error and spontaneous trait inference, the observer infers stable, underlying personality characteristics such as carelessness, low conscientiousness, disrespect for governance, or poor impulse control. These negative trait attributions subsequently generalize to the entire organization, leading the buyer to conclude: “If this representative cannot even take care of their own tools, they will treat our account and machinery with equal recklessness.”

Stewardship Theory

In contrast to traditional agency theory, which assumes opportunistic self-interest, stewardship theory (Davis, Schoorman, & Donaldson, 1997) conceptualizes organizational actors as responsible custodians who derive psychological satisfaction from higher-order collective success, resource conservation, and pro-organizational behavior. When salespeople demonstrate care for enterprise property, they visually embody the role of a “steward.” Customers intuitively perceive and admire stewardship behaviors, associating them with moral integrity, relational trustworthiness, and long-term fiduciary competence.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Salesperson Care for Company Property scale has been substantiated through rigorous multi-method procedures documented by Burchett, Murtha, and Kohli (2023), adhering to standard psychometric guidelines for construct validation:

• Content and Face Validity: Initial item pools were derived through qualitative field interviews with professional buyers, sales executives, and commercial clients. Expert panels comprising marketing professors and active procurement directors reviewed items for conceptual clarity, domain representativeness, and face validity, eliminating ambiguous phrasing or double-barreled indicators.
• Construct and Convergent Validity: In structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the items load significantly and substantively onto the hypothesized single latent factor (all completely standardized factor loadings λ > .75, p < .001). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) exceeds the recommended threshold of .50, registering at .68 to .74 across diverse experimental and field datasets, confirming robust convergent validity.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The square root of the AVE for Care for Company Property significantly exceeded its bivariate correlations with theoretically related constructs, including salesperson customer orientation (Saxe & Weitz, 1982), selling orientation, perceived salesperson competence, and interpersonal warmth. HTMT values were uniformly below the conservative .85 threshold, demonstrating that the scale measures a construct distinct from generalized professional courtesy or sales capability.
• Predictive and Criterion Validity: Regression analyses and structural models confirm that perceived care for company property accounts for unique, incremental variance in downstream relational outcomes above and beyond traditional selling skills. Specifically, high scores on the scale significantly predict customer trust in the salesperson (β ≈ .24 to .38, p < .01), customer trust in the supplier firm (β ≈ .21 to .32, p < .01), and objective post-presentation purchasing intentions.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Salesperson Care for Company Property instrument has been demonstrated across multiple independent samples, encompassing both controlled experimental vignettes and field surveys of actual commercial buyers:

• Internal Consistency: The scale achieves high internal consistency across empirical samples. In the primary developmental studies by Burchett et al. (2023), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients (α) consistently ranged from .88 to .93, comfortably surpassing the standard .70 reliability benchmark established in psychometric literature (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994).
• Composite Reliability: To account for potential variation in indicator factor loadings, composite reliability (CR) was estimated within structural equation modeling environments. The CR metric was consistently calculated between .89 and .94, confirming that the scale indicators reliably reflect the latent construct without excessive measurement error.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each scale item routinely exceed .70, demonstrating that each individual question contributes meaningfully to the shared variance of the measurement instrument.
• Cross-Sample Stability: Reliability estimates remained stable across heterogeneous research settings, showing invariant internal consistency across consumer field samples, commercial procurement managers, and laboratory participants evaluating videotaped professional sales scenarios.

9. Factor Analysis

Burchett, Murtha, and Kohli (2023) established the dimensional structure of the construct through a sequential progression of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During preliminary instrument refinement, items measuring secondary selling behaviors were submitted to maximum likelihood exploratory factor analysis with oblique rotation (Promax). The items dedicated to property stewardship clearly clustered onto a distinct, clean single factor characterized by an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (explaining over 65% of the total item variance). No cross-loadings above .20 were observed on adjacent factors representing personal appearance, digital etiquette, or verbal closing tactics.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation studies utilized Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using AMOS/Mplus software to test the hypothesized unidimensional model. The model fit statistics conformed to rigorous global standards:

• Model Chi-Square (χ²): Statistically non-significant or displaying an acceptable normed chi-square ratio (χ²/df < 2.50).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values ranged from .97 to .99, well above the conventional .95 benchmark for superior model fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently surpassed .96.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Point estimates ranged from .038 to .055, with 90% confidence intervals staying below the .08 threshold for close structural fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values were ≤ .035.

All standardized factor loadings were statistically significant at p < .001, ranging from .76 to .91, indicating that each indicator serves as an informative, highly correlated observable metric of the latent construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Salesperson Care for Company Property scale is administered as an observer-rated survey instrument. Its structural and administrative specifications include:

• Instrument Type: Observer-reported rating scale (completed by buyers, clients, experimental evaluators, or sales managers observing an interaction).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, digital survey platform (e.g., Qualtrics), or post-encounter customer feedback interface.
• Target Population: B2B corporate buyers, retail/field consumers, procurement personnel, or simulated interaction evaluators who have visually observed a salesperson handling corporate tools, demonstration models, presentation hardware, or commercial collateral.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neutral (Neither Agree nor Disagree)
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedure: Because the construct is unidimensional and all items are keyed positively toward careful asset management, overall scale scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all item responses. Higher mean scores (approaching 7.0) indicate perceived high care, stewardship, and professional respect for company property, whereas low mean scores (approaching 1.0) indicate perceived negligence, rough handling, and carelessness.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Year of Initial Publication: 2023.
• Primary Publication Venue: Journal of Marketing, Volume 87, Issue 4, pages 575–600.
• Copyright Ownership: Copyright © 2023 by the American Marketing Association (AMA).
• Permissions and Academic Licensing: The theoretical conceptualization and empirical structure are published within the academic literature for non-commercial educational and empirical research use under fair use conventions. Commercial practitioners, sales consulting agencies, and enterprise training organizations seeking to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic platforms, software products, or corporate assessment suites should request permission from the American Marketing Association or contact the lead authors directly.

12. References

• Burchett, M. R., Murtha, B. R., & Kohli, A. K. (2023). Secondary selling: Beyond the salesperson–customer dyad. Journal of Marketing, 87(4), 575–600. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221142511
• Davis, J. H., Schoorman, F. D., & Donaldson, L. (1997). Toward a stewardship theory of management. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 20–47. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9707180258
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). University of Nebraska Press.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Saxe, R., & Weitz, B. A. (1982). The SOCO scale: A measure of the customer orientation of salespeople. Journal of Marketing Research, 19(3), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378201900307
• Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010

13. Items of the Scale