What’s the next step after you’ve done something wrong? Do you avoid the injured party or rush to repair the relationship?

Thanks to Tim Manners at Cool News of the Day for catching a press release about a Houston professor who is studying how shame–a feeling of disgrace or regret–affects sales people’s behavior. Warning: this study is valuable, but I don’t think the results are conclusive. But we’re onto something here.

Link: Reveries – Marketing Insights and Ideas.

"We focused on shame having found in earlier studies that the experience of this emotion is universal and can be quite intense among salespeople," explains Richard Bagozzi of Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. "What differs is how they cope with it or react to it, and, therefore, how it affects their performance."