Assignment 2: Joe Salatino, President of Great Northern American
BUS 520
4/29/2012

It seems like Great Northern American has done a decent job of using learning concepts to improve salesperson performance they have been going at it for 35 years, after all, and are still competitive in the marketplace. It would appear that Joe Salatino has proven techniques that help incentivize people to generate sales for the company. The case mentioned that the company was faced with stiff competition from internet sellers. With the developments in the past decade of telecommuting arrangements, there may be threats from direct competitors that employ cheaper methods of direct selling.
As President of the organization he is responsible to give direction to his employees. He needs to help them to understand the Company's mission and work towards it. Joe could do an analysis of the organizational culture of his own company with them. Anonymously or directly he could ask their employees what is the perception they have about the Company. After that ask what in their opinion may have generated this perception. Mr. Salatino can show how these perceptions ultimately influence the organization both positively and negatively. He could address the differences in the each individual personality, as people have different types of management, motivational issues, training, etc .So he could do an analysis of how perceptions and attributions that employees have on the Company align with it goals. He can show how these perceptions contribute or not to the company achieve its objectives. Then on he could make a connection with the perception that customers have about the company and how the Company can improve this relationship by developing skills that improve the performance of their employees in meet more effectively the needs of its customers. His employees should understand that can be heard and that their just demands are met. This type of relationship will bring loyalty and create a model more effective to work with their clients.
Self-efficacy is basically an individual’s confidence in their ability to perform a specific task in a specific situation. Salatino is essentially looking for salespeople with a high level of self-efficacy. These would be independent people with an internal locus of control; they would probably not be stressed by a loud, fast-paced environment and a reward system that only rewards them when they perform well. And they would push themselves to do better each month. Self efficacy influences what activities and goals individuals choose for themselves and how much persistence and effort they exert. Potential new hires that had already been effective previously as a salesperson would probably have a higher level of self-efficacy, so it would make sense for Salatino to hire salespeople with as much experience as possible.“Performance accomplishments are the most influential sources of efficacy information because they are based on personal mastery experience. Vicarious experience obtained through observation of successful or unsuccessful performance of others is next most potent and, indeed, may account for a major part of learning throughout life”. (Rosenstock, PhD, Strecher, PhD, & Becker, PhD, 1988).
I suggest that Mr. Salatino bring ideas of success from the market and discuss them with its employees and discuss ways to adapt them to the characteristics and mission of the company. At these meetings, perhaps weekly, can be addressed competencies that must be assimilated by the sales team to align themselves with the business goals, becoming agents of implementation and change. Employees must understand that they are heard and that they can speak openly. When this happens, Mr. Palatine may understand better the views and feelings of his employees and directs them to the points that can substantially improve the company culture. Being a role model, he will create confidence and will show the way that his employees need to follow to achieve the desired results.
Additionally, I would recommend they become more educated about telecommuting, and effective ways of improving performance when salespeople are in remote locations. Buyers are turning more and more towards the web to make their purchases, and having a large workforce in a salesroom carries overhead costs that some of their online competitors may not have. It’s possible that the camaraderie shared by working in the salesroom carries its own form of positive reinforcement that is a financial benefit to the company. But if competitors begin to undercut them, they could look at ways of maintaining high performance through telecommuting. This could be done by having a live web page that shows active sales promotions, top sellers for the hour/day/week, and current commission due to the telemarketer. There are several methods that can be used when it comes to devising a plan or a method of viewing others perceived perceptions. There are many ways in which a person can see how people and/or animals think and get their perceived notions on how things go in life and in the world. In looking at the different ways that things are seen one may look at in three (3) or more ways, those being classical conditioning, social learning and operant conditioning are three very different learning methods. The three methods have the word conditioning in common. What is conditioning? Conditioning is the learning of specific patterns of behavior in the presence of well-defined backgrounds or environments. While classical and operant conditioning are basic forms of learning, social is a type of learned behavior that comes from interactions with different people.
Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which a person/animal learns to transfer a natural response from one particular event to another, previously neutral event or action. This is done by manipulating reflexes. Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which the likelihood of a behavior is increased or decreased by the use of reinforcement or punishment. Operant conditioning deals with more cognitive thought process. Social learning theory is a type learning in which a person/animal learns both negative and positive forms of reinforcement by things they perceive in society or social settings. These three forms of learning have similarities and differences. Their similarities are that they all produce basic phenomena. One such phenomenon is acquisition. All types of conditioning result in the inheritance of a behavior. One of the most famous of experiments that illustrates classical conditioning is Pavlov's Dogs. In this experiment, Pavlov sat behind a one-way mirror and controlled a bell after ringing of the bell, Pavlov gave the dog food. The key to operant conditioning is reinforcement. Reinforcement is when a stimulus is presented that increases the probability that the preceding response will recur in the future. If reinforcement is withheld, extinction will occur in operant conditioning. According to the Classical Learning Theory, we learn by trial and error, just as Skinner’s dog. Psychologist Donald Campbell is of the opinion that trial and error results in long lasting acquired behavior. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, the proponent of the Social Learning Theory, disagrees. He states: "Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences." [Bandura, 1977] Bandura moves beyond the Classical Learning Theory and delves deeper, with his Social Learning Theory.
His theory can be summarized as follows:
(a) He says that we learn by observing others.
(b) He focuses on the power of examples and the importance of role models.
(c) He stresses the importance of vicarious behavior as a means to modify behavior.
Bandura’s theory can be best illustrated by considering the example and the effect of the media. Bandura also said, in this regard, According to “Children and adults acquire attitudes, emotional responses, and new styles of conduct through filmed and televised modeling." Another caution is that TV viewing might create a violent reality, which has to be feared for its capacity to influence the way we deal with people every day. [Lefkowitz, Eron, Walder, Huesmann, 1977] According to his theory, three stages can be identified in the link between passive violence (just watching) and active violence (Actually carrying it out). These three stages are:
(a) Attention
(b) Retention
(c) Motivation.
The second stage is retention. According to Williams [1986] people learn things by vicariously experiencing them. A TV viewer can watch the most graphic, explicit and/or violent acts and experience the thrills, the fear, the strength and what not – all in the safety of his own room, in his own house, before his TV screen and, as mentioned before, people don’t just react to things, they interpret them. So a TV viewer interprets these TV experiences according to his cognitive and emotional levels, and then stores them in his memory. These memories may remain unused and untapped for years, they may contribute towards shaping future such active or passive experiences, or they may be used.
When a person vicariously learns something that affects him deeply, he will be tempted to try it out for him or herself and see what happens. Would he experience the same results as the on-screen protagonists? Here Bandura makes an important distinction when he says that “The highest level of observational learning is achieved by first organizing and rehearsing the modeled behavior symbolically, and then enacting it the widely accepted dictum that behavior is governed by its consequences fares better for anticipated than for actual consequences.” In other words, the person tries out the experience on the basis of what he perceives the outcome to be, rather than what may be the actual outcome. All these things can be reversed by the same processes. Thus new behavior can be conditioned via reinforcing appropriate behavior; by modeling appropriate behavior (often used for teaching social skills and assertiveness for example). People can be helped to increase their expectancies via observational learning as well. When a model shows they can overcome fear for example, this in turn helps the observer overcome their fear. Furthermore self-instructions can help people change their expectancies about outcomes. Social learning claims that they way that people think, plan, perceive and believe is an important part of learning. It also points out that many experiments are carried out on animals and that therefore the laws of learning they discover, while having some relevance to humans, are not complete or complex enough to account for more complex human behavior and learning. Social learning also claims that behaviorism ignores the social dimensions of learning, treating us as though we are individual animals. In humans, however, many reinforcements are social in nature.
Some of the differences between social learning, operant and classical conditioning lie in the extent to which reinforcement depends on the behavior of the learner. In classical conditioning, the learner is automatically reinforced. That is how it learns to respond to a once neutral stimulus. In operant conditioning, the learner must provide a correct response in order to receive the reinforcement. Another difference between the three forms of conditioning is the type of behavior to which each method applies. Classical conditioning applies to a behavior that is always wanted. It was Pavlov's purpose to have the dogs salivate on command. In operant conditioning, a behavior can be learned or extinguished. If you wanted to train a dog not to do something, you would use a form of punishment. Classical, social learning and operant conditioning are similar, but they do differ in a few ways. All are fairly reliable ways to teach a person or animal to act in a specific manor.
According to the case study of Joe Salantino the President of the Great Northern American Company he used a system of social learning behavior simply due to the fact that he used a reward system. Based on how well a person sold that month determined how much they made that week and overall how much they made that month. While some employees made $60,000 or lower some of his employees made upwards of $100,000 a year. His more lucrative employees made more money simply because they took more innovative approaches towards the customers and actually took upon themselves to subscribes to magazines and newspapers in the community where their subscribers lived so they could stay abreast of some of the happenings that went on in the town or surrounding areas so that when they were able to reach them they could talk to them about the comings and goings of the town, or someone’s wedding, or someone giving birth. They even went as far as sending gift baskets and other gifts so that it would appear as they were actually from that town and knew people there. That was just one innovative way of making sure they had repeat business. Others made sure that they were fast but efficient with businesses so as to not take too much of their time. They wanted businesses to know that they understood time was money and they didn’t want to waste their time. While some took to the internet to post that they were having a sale going on for a short amount of time. Prices would be slashed and deals such as a two for one deal would be posted, or a deal of 50% to 60% off would be posted for a specified time, and then the regular price would then be put back. They found that these tactics worked but only with certain workers. Some workers found that they could not do the job or found the rush of the job to be too much and would quit after only a few days.
Joe Salatino made it an environment to where if you could not handle a healthy amount of competition and a fast paced work environment then he would have to take certain actions. The perception that people saw about the company was one in which they would have to make sure they could be courteous, kind, and efficient or the business and the clientele would not continue to grow. He made it his personal mission to ensure that the business not only continued to grow but also expand beyond measure. He wanted to make that all his employees could perform the tasks that he had set before them that needed to be completed that day or for that month. Therefore he made sure that all aspects of the job could be covered by the right person. He wanted a person that could always close the deal so to speak and that the person could not only get the job done but could go above and beyond for the customers and make sure that they got exactly what they asked for and maybe something a little extra. Because of his tactics and his own innovation he not only made sure that the clients were taken care of but that he had repeat customers that would brag on his company and send their friends to his company as well. He made sure that everything and everyone was covered and did their jobs so that everyone would not only be happy but also be happy to come to work.

References
Bandura, Albert. (1977). Social Learning Theory. General Learning Press.
Lefkowitz, M.M., Eron, L.D., Walder, L.O., & Huesmann, L.R. (1977). Growing up to be violent. New York: Pergamon
Rosenstock, PhD, I., Strecher, PhD, V., & Becker, PhD, M. (1988). Social Learning Theory and the Health Belief Model. CONTRIBUTION OF HBM TO SELF-EFFICACY THEORY, p. 180.
Williams, T.M. (Ed.). (1986). The impact of television: A natural experiment involving three towns. New York: Academic Press.