Calibrated Psychological Capital: A Curvilinear Model of Financial Advisor Sales Performance and Retention

Krishna Alejandrino

doi:10.58870/berj.v11i1.90

Authors

Krishna Alejandrino Graduate School of Business, San Beda University, Manila, Philippines

Keywords:

transformational leadership, optimism, self-efficacy, financial advisor retention, PLS-SEM

Abstract

Developing sustainable sales productivity and retaining sales employees are emerging challenges in human resource management, sales management, and positive organizational psychology. While psychological capital (PC) and supervisory leadership are proximal antecedents to the staying and sales performance of commission-based employees, little is known about how these predictors interact to yield superior sales performance and employee retention. This empirical investigation identifies how transformational leadership, optimism, and sales-centric self-efficacy jointly predict the performance and intention to stay of 138 financial advisors employed by three life insurance companies in Metro Manila. Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling with WarpPLS 8.0, the findings reveal that leaders best cultivate optimism and self-efficacy. Optimism robustly predicted employees’ intention to stay but did not significantly predict sales performance, while self-efficacy predicted intention to stay through a linear pathway and related to sales performance only through a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped pathway rather than a linear one. Transformational leadership had little direct effect on performance or employees' intentions to stay. In contrast, self-efficacy followed an inverted U-shape: higher self-efficacy was associated with higher sales performance, but only up to a point. Results also indicated that experience moderated the leadership–performance and self-efficacy–performance relationships such that years of experience positively predicted the leadership–performance relationship but negatively predicted the self-efficacy–performance relationship beyond an optimal threshold. A three-dimensional Performance Zone Framework integrating leadership exposure, career experience, and sales output classified advisors into six exploratory, theory-derived zones, each with distinct intervention requirements. These findings underscore that calibrated, rather than maximized, psychological capital, combined with leadership matched to the career stage, predicts both retention and productivity in commission-based sales work.

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