Humility, Trust, and Satisfaction: Examining the Salesperson/Sales Manager Relationship

In spite of the increasing presence of the use of virtues in the theory and practice of business management, humility is not considered one of the pertinent virtues in the corporate world. In addition, there exists an insignificant amount of empirical evidence regarding the importance of manager humility and its relationships with employee trust, performance, and satisfaction. This lack of research is even more significant within the context of business-to-business sales management. This paper explains the basic foundation of humility and its traits and how they may manifest in a sales-managers profession and performance. The purpose of this research is to investigate and provide empirical evidence regarding sales-manager humility and its relationship with employee trust and satisfaction. Manager humility has a significant, positive correlation with salesperson trust for and satisfaction with that manager. There is a notable relationship between employee religiosity and trust and employee religiosity and supervisor satisfaction as well.