The influence of personality on the job performance of key account managers

Abstract

Key account management (KAM) is a current and relevant topic in the business-to-business marketing context. KAM can be defined as identification and serving of company’s strategically important customers. Although KAM is widely studied, less attention has been paid to KAM’s essential ingredient: the key account manager. This research focuses on the job performance of the key account manager; more precisely, on the influence of personality on that performance.

While identifying the relationship between personality and key account manager job performance, different research methods were used. Development and validation of a personality inventory called for survey research with analysis tools ranging from correlation to confirmatory factor analysis. For the research on the relationship of personality and job performance 180 Finnish key account managers were surveyed. In the data analysis, correlation and regression analyses were utilized.

The academic contribution of this research can be divided into two parts: scale development and relationship identification. The first contribution of the research is the personality inventory, which can be used to assess the Big Five personality traits in the Finnish context. The second contribution is the increased knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and key account manager job performance. The results showed that extraversion had the strongest relationship with job performance. The positive relationship was identified as statistically very significant. Conscientiousness and agreeableness also had statistically significant, positive relationships with job performance. Openness to experience had a weak relationship with job performance. Finally, emotional stability was found to have no statistically significant relationship with job performance.

This research increases the knowledge of the influence of personality on key account manager job performance. Organizations can use this information in their recruitment processes. These results could also be found useful for some aspects of training and new employee orientation processes.

It would be beneficial to the research community to know more of the personal aspects that influence key account manager job performance. Effects of motivation, intelligence, or narrow personality traits concerning job performance could be analyzed. Finding out the profile of the well performing key account manager would also be both scientifically interesting and commercially valuable.