The dose makes the poison: Investigating the optimum level of a salesperson's charisma

What makes someone charismatic? Charismatic individuals – whether actors, politicians, celebrities, or athletes – possess the ability to articulate themselves through specific behaviours that inspire others. Recent research has confirmed that charisma is learnable, and that it relates to various performance and organizational outcomes in multiple fields. Although this stream of research has contributed a great deal of insight, there is still limited understanding of how to develop charisma and whether there exists an optimum level (i. e., saturation) of charisma, especially in the personal selling domain. The present article reviews the extant literature, derives four hypotheses on the effects of various training methods on customer responses, and collects empirical data in the field. The findings indicate a positive effect of charisma training on perceived charisma and favourable customer response.