A Spherical Fuzzy Framework for Sales Personnel Selection

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to provide an extension of the personality style-based psychological comparative assessment of salesmen using three orientations such as task, people, and organizations ("Sales Troika"or ST). Contrasting to the classical ST model, we use spherical fuzzy set (SFS) for ranking of statements and subsequent score calculations. Personality assessment (PA) is an important aspect during the process of recruitment and selection. PA acts as one of the critical success factors for effective selection as personality significantly influences the performance of the employee. The psychological frameworks follow conventional scoring which suffers from subjective bias. The present paper attempts to offset the subjective bias (due to imprecise and uncertain information) by using SFS-based rating and calculations. The study is carried out in two steps. First, a group of five candidates applying for sales job at the junior level have taken part in the comparative assessment process. We use our framework to classify the respondents according to their style. Second, we carry out a SFS-based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) for their relative ranking based on the opinions of the members of a selection panel. To carry out the comparative assessment of the candidates based on experts' ratings, we use the modified SF LOgarithmic Percentage Change-driven Objective Weighting (LOPCOW) method. We examine the stability and accuracy of the SFS-MCDA model through validity testing and sensitivity analysis. We observe a resemblance between the decision of the panel and the PA results.

Received: 13 August 2022 | Revised: 28 September 2022 | Accepted: 7 October 2022

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Sanjib Biswas: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Project administration. Shreya Chatterjee: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Shuvendu Majumder: Conceptualization, Validation, Investigation, Resources, Writing – review & editing, Supervision.