Abstract

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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>The purpose of this paper is to use the perspective of ego to investigate the spirituality of a salesperson and its influence on customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior. Meaningful work is proposed as a mediator.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title>
<jats:p>Cross-sectional data were collected from 218 insurance salespeople in India. Bootstrap with SEM was used to test mediation.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title>
<jats:p>The paper finds that there is full mediation through meaningful work on both the outcome behaviors.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Research limitations/implications</jats:title>
<jats:p>The findings will encourage researchers to link various salesperson outcomes such as ethical sales behavior, salesperson service behavior, and so on to spirituality.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title>
<jats:p>The findings can provide some relevant inputs for sales leadership actions aimed at facilitating employees’ spiritual experiences.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title>
<jats:p>This is among the first few studies, as what the authors believe, in the sales literature to find out that spirituality and sales job not only can co-exist, but they do complement each other.</jats:p>
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