Personal stress is a prevalent problem in a connected world. For salespeople, demands of a connected workplace have largely eliminated boundaries between personal and work life, allowing stress from personal issues to spill over into their work. Thus, problems of health, relationships, and finances are no longer "left at home" for salespeople. Rather, a less central workplace model (e.g., remote workplaces and mobile platforms) and 24/7 work expectations expand the workplace, which comingles personal and work demands. Utilizing a sample of 331 salespeople, we study personal stressors that cross boundaries into the workplace and find that they play a critical role in the formation of burnout across its dimensions, which leads to reduced salesperson performance. Our research contributes to the sales literature by investigating individual personal stressors via Job Demands and Conservation of Resources theories and offers insights for managers of salespeople that face both personal and work stress.
Point of sale cause-related marketing has raised over $2 billion for charities over the past 30 years, yet the subject remains largely unexplored in academic literature. The subject of brand/cause fit, however, is prolific throughout extant research, with many studies showing that high congruence between a company and a charity is necessary to achieve philanthropic success. This paper challenges current marketing thinking both conceptually and empirically. Employing tests of no-effect hypotheses following the guidelines set out by Cortina and Folger (1998), it is established that, in the point of sale cause-related marketing context, the traditional effects of brand/cause fits do not apply. Across three studies involving experimental designs and over 500 respondents, the results of one-way ANOVA analyses consistently demonstrate that a low brand/cause fit can be just as effective as a high/brand cause fit. These findings contribute to a profound understanding of social efforts such as cause-related marketing may not be as simple or easily understood as was once thought.
Purpose
This study aims to examine the impact of stress as a result of adverse life events on a salesperson’s ability to effectively manage customer relationships. The framework identifies burnout as a key mediating variable and salesperson grit as a coping mechanism.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data is gathered from 364 B2B salespeople and investigated using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.2.
Findings
The findings reveal adverse life events and their corresponding stress diminish a salesperson’s ability to manage customer relationships effectively through the mediators of reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization. Thus, negative events of a personal nature can have a significant impact on salesperson outcomes and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as job-related stress. Furthermore, results show that salesperson grit provides mixed results as a coping mechanism.
Practical implications
The findings indicate that practitioners should be mindful of the negative impact adverse life events can have on work-related outcomes. Organizations and sales managers must be intentional in managing relationships with their salespeople and strategic in the structure they use to manage customer relationships. Recommendations include the use of regular one-on-one meetings to open up a dialogue about work or personal issues the salesperson is experiencing and assigning multiple resources or staff to service valuable customers, thereby not relying on solitary salespeople.
Originality/value
Employee well-being contributes to firm value; yet, this is the first study in sales to explore the impact of adverse life events on salesperson outcomes.
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