A parsimonious measure of the interpersonal orientation of salespeople

Subhra Chakrabarty and Robert E. Widing

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2026, vol. 38, issue 4, 481-493

Abstract: Salespeople in the pharmaceutical industry were surveyed to assess the degree to which they were high/low on interpersonal orientation (IO). Swap and Rubin's (1983) 29-item IO scale was used. Unfortunately, to date, no one has analysed the reliability and validity of the 29-item IO scale. This study corrects this deficiency and the results of a psychometric analysis revealed that a reduced version of the scale is reliable and valid. In using the scale, we were able to confirm that as salespeople's IO scores increased, they were more engaged in adaptive selling, which supports the scale's nomological validity. The reduced IO scale has a practical effect of having one-third fewer items, which should help reduce respondent fatigue and survey abandonment. We recommend that for future research, the reduced scale presented here is considered by researchers.

Keywords: interpersonal orientation; salespeople; reliability; validity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=153529 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijbexc:v:38:y:2026:i:4:p:481-493

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Business Excellence from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().