Emotional exhaustion is a potentially important construct in examining sales force behavior and attitude relationships. A conceptual model and hypotheses are developed to study the antecedents and consequences of the emotional exhaustion construct. The hypotheses are tested using LISREL 7 to analyze data from a sample of field salespeople from a large international services organization. The empirical results offer strong support for relationships involving role ambiguity and conflict antecedents and organizational commitment, job satisfaction, performance, and intention-to-leave consequences of emotional exhaustion.
Investigates the antecedents and outcomes of salesperson burnout. Prior research on burnout in personal selling is extended by including a more complete set of predictors of burnout, and by testing the conceptual model of burnout using a multi‐company sample of field salespeople in an international setting. Relationships among burnout, attitudes, and behavior are predicted based on relevant literature, and are tested using survey results from 148 field salespeople in Australia. Path analysis results show that the proposed conceptual model fits the data well. Intrinsic motivation, role ambiguity, and role conflict are all significant antecedents of burnout. Job satisfaction and salesperson performance are direct outcomes of burnout, and also mediate the indirect influence of burnout on organizational commitment and intention to leave. Implications for salesforce management and future research are discussed.
The author develops a comprehensive inventory of selling activities and uses it to analyze the jobs of 1393 salespeople employed by 51 industrial selling organizations. He also develops a taxonomy of sales activities based on frequency of occurrence of 121 sales activities. In addition, a taxonomy of six industrial sales jobs is created from configurations of sales activity factors. Managerial implications of the findings are discussed and directions for further research are proposed.
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