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NTU Management Review Vol. 33 No. 3 Dec. 2023

4. Empirical Analysis

4.1 Descriptive Statistics, Pearson and Spearman Correlations
We present the descriptive statistics of the variables in Table 3. The average ratio of
senior salespersons for a branch office is 0.25 and the natural logarithm of the average

advertising funding allocation for a branch office is 10.30. In addition, Ab_SENIOR
i,t
ranges from -0.44 to 0.71, and Ab_ADV ranges from -4.49 to 7.67. A higher inequity in
i,t
the total number of senior salespersons and the amount of advertising funding indicate

that regional managers allocate more unexpected senior salespersons and advertising
funding to a branch office and vice versa. CONSENSUS ranges from 0.01 to 1.00, with
i,t
1.00 indicating a complete consensus with the company’s goals; around 30% of the branch
offices have prior sales performance ranked in the top 25 percent in the same region and
the same month.

Table 4 shows the Pearson and Spearman correlations among the variables. We find
9
that Ab_SENIOR is positively correlated with PERF i,t-1 , REGIONAL_AGE , PRICE i,t,
i,t
i,t
DEAL , and CYCLE . This may indicate that better prior sales performance, higher property
i,t
i,t
price per deal, a greater number of houses sold, and higher residential house transactions
are associated with higher allocation of unexpected senior salespersons. We also find that
Ab_ADV is positively correlated with CONSENSUS . These findings indicate that the
i,t
i,t
level of goal consensus is correlated with a higher allocation of unexpected advertising
expenditure. Although some significant and strongly correlated coefficients are found

between the independent variables in Table 3, multicollinearity is unlikely to be a concern
as the variance inflation factor (VIF) values are lower than 10 (Kutner, Nachtsheim, and
Neter, 2004).

4.2 Goal Consensus, Subordinates’ Prior Performance, and Resource Allocation
Preferences
The empirical results for our hypotheses are shown in Table 5. Columns (1) and (2) in
Table 5 show that the effect of goal consensus (CONSENSUS ) is positive and statistically
i,t
significant in relation to Ab_ADV (t = 2.37, p < 0.01) but not Ab_SENIOR (t = 0.41, p
i,t
i,t

9 The upper right coefficients are Spearman correlation coefficients.

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