Personality Traits and Sales Effectiveness: The Life Insurance Market in Poland

Abstract

Within organizations in industrialized countries, the quality of human resources tends to become a major issue on the path to achieving a competitive advantage. According to the author’s research, the implementation of the five-factor model of Costa and McCrae provides the solution for the abovementioned problem. This article demonstrates the crucial utility of the five-factor model of Costa and McCrae in the context of life insurance industry effectiveness from both the theoretical and practical perspectives based on a case study of the four largest life insurance companies 796 most effective agents. Results imply the existence of a positive correlation between the level of the selected personality traits intensities and the life insurance agent’s sales efficiency. Moreover, as levels of the personality traits of “openness to experience,” “consciousness,” “agreeableness” and “neuroticism” are the predictors of life insurance company effectiveness, there are fundamentals for induction to be appropriate for the whole retail financial sector human resources management system.