Bringing Meaning to the Sales Job: The Effect of Ethical Climate and Customer Demandingness

Abstract

Top performing salespeople are attracted to organizations that provide opportunities to make full use of their abilities. Responses from 1450 sales directors from a leading direct selling organization were used to examine salesperson's experienced meaningfulness. Results show that experienced meaningfulness is critical to sales because it impacts salesperson's performance, turnover intentions and felt stress. Further, ethical climate and customer demandingness influence experienced meaningfulness perceptions.

Customer misbehavior and store managers' work‐to‐family enrichment: The moderated mediation effect of work meaningfulness and organizational affective commitment

“…Several researchers (e.g., Dimitrov, ; Jaramillo, Mulki, & Boles, ) have pointed out the importance of bringing work meaningfulness to service employees since these employees need to work long hours serving their customers, and many of them suffer from losing their own true self. We propose that customer misbehavior does generate challenges to the work meaningfulness of retail store managers.…”

The Relationship Between Occupational Burnout and Perceived Ethical Leadership Style

“…On the other hand, some authors provide contradictory results stating that ethical leadership may increase occupational burnout (Liu, Loi, & Lam, 2013). Ethical requirements and high standards of moral performance from the leader may cause challenges for subordinates, increase tension and stress, that lead to exhaustion (Jaramillo, Mulki, & Boles, 2013). Also the relationship between ethical leadership style and employees' occupational burnout may be different due to certain socio-demographic characteristics of employee.…”