Can’t leave it at home? The effects of personal stress on burnout and salesperson performance

Abstract

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.

Activating salesperson resilience during the COVID-19 crisis: The roles of employer event communication and customer demandingness

“…This distinguishes our study from the extant research, as shown in the review in Table 1 , which has mainly investigated resilience from crises, including pandemics, at the macro levels such as organizations ( Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020 ; Rapaccini et al, 2020 ; Sharma et al, 2020 ; Zafari et al, 2020 ) or industries ( Okorie et al, 2020 ; Remko, 2020 ). Research has been scarce in terms of resilience among workers during a crisis, particularly in the sales context ( Peasley et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Regardless of the magnitude of sales employees' resilience in contributing to their sales performance ( Coomer, 2016 ; Lussier & Hartmann, 2017 ; Meintjes & Hofmeyr, 2018 ; Peesker et al, 2019 ), scant scholarly attention has been devoted to how sales employees, particularly in the B2B domain, experienced a pandemic crisis ( Hartmann & Lussier, 2020 ) as well as became resilient and grew through it ( Peasley, Hochstein, Britton, Srivastava, & Stewart, 2020 ). As the review in Table 1 indicates, research on the impacts of crises or epidemics on the B2B industries has tended to assess the resilience of industries, supply chains ( Okorie et al, 2020 ; Remko, 2020 ), or B2B organizations ( Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020 ; Rapaccini et al, 2020 ; Sharma et al, 2020 ; Zafari et al, 2020 ).…”

Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impact on office worker productivity and work experience

“…At the same time, the unclear boundaries between home and office might have increased work expectations [44]. For example, Peasley et al [45] found that sales personnel felt burned out when trying to meet the management's expectations and they believed that job expectations became higher as soon as they started working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. With this increase in expectations, workers might be tasked with more duties and expected to deliver additional work, increasing working hours and requiring them to spend additional time at their workstations [46].…”

Antecedents and Consequences of Work Stress Behavior

“…From the individual side, there are several changes that individuals feel when experiencing pressure or tension related to work, namely physical reactions, emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Changes occur in physical conditions to the emergence of various health problems, for example, the consequences of work stress in the studies that are made into the literature by the author, namely health damage (Petek, 2018;Sidhu et al, 2020), mental health and psychopathological symptoms (Fortes et al, 2020), emotional exhaustion (Kashif et al, 2017;Peasley et al, 2020) and burnout/fatigue (Chen, 2020;Park et al, 2020 Parveen andAdeinat, 2019). This has an impact on the incidence of individual costs (Molek-Winiarska and Molek Kozakowska, 2020) Changes that occur at the individual level will affect attitudes towards work.…”

“…When experiencing burnout, people will show absenteeism from work or increased absenteeism. Some of the antecedents of job stress related to attitudes towards work in the observed literature include job dissatisfaction/satisfaction (Darte-Baah, 2019; Heyder, 2019;Pandey, 2020;Park and Jang, 2017), reduced personal achievement and depersonalization (Peasley et al, 2020), career satisfaction, performance role and extrarole performance (Nisar and Rasheed, 2019), work motivation (Kongcharoen et al, 2019) intention turnover (Park et al, 2020;Yousaf et al, 2020), and job involvement (Klein et al, 2019).…”