Polychronicity and Scheduling’s Role in Reducing Role Stress and Enhancing Sales Performance

Abstract

Organizations can pursue a competitive advantage by guarding and enhancing one of its most precious marketplace assets-the sales force. Hiring salespeople who are suited for their role is critical within an increasingly global and competitive environment, and doing so generates dividends for increasing sales force retention, sales productivity, and performance. In addition to effective recruiting, reducing role stress is one way to achieve an acceptable sales force retention rate. Today salespeople must overcome the now frazzled pace of a hypercompetitive selling environment and splice their time effectively across customers and opportunities. This study introduces the impact that polychronicity-an employee's preference for switching between multiple tasks within the same block of time-has on job performance and the components of role stress, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Findings demonstrate that a polychronic orientation has a positive impact on performance and a negative impact on role ambiguity. A salesperson's propensity for scheduling and meeting deadlines reveals similar effects and highlights the desirability of hiring salespeople who are both disciplined and adaptive with their time.christophe fournier (Ph.D., Montpellier II University), Professor of Marketing, Institut d'Administration des Entreprises, Montpellier 2 University, Montpellier Recherche Management, christophe .fournier@univ-montp2.fr. William a. Weeks

The Ambidextrous Sales Force: Aligning Salesperson Polychronicity and Selling Contexts for Sales-Service Behaviors and Customer Value

“…A crucial aspect of polychronicity relates to the individual’s ability to manage different and competing priorities, both mentally and socially (Bluedorn 2002). Research in sales finds that polychronicity helps improve salesperson performance in the face of ambiguous job demands (Fournier et al 2013). Thus, for B2B sales roles defined by both service and sales tasks, polychronic salespeople can more easily engage in several activities during a given time period and thus should be better able to switch back and forth among different tasks such as selling and servicing customers than monochronic salespeople.…”

“…This unforeseen service obligation changes the nature of how the salesperson must manage their time and the relationship interactions in order to resolve the service issue effectively and uphold the cross-selling objective during the customer visit. Under such circumstances, a polychronic salesperson should be better able to handle an unforeseen customer service request and, while also on the visit, explore the cross-selling opportunity; conversely, a monochronic salesperson who prefers “closure on one task before moving on to the next task” (Fournier et al 2013, p. 199) is less equipped to practice this sort of mental and social management. Thus, we believe polychronic salespeople will exhibit more SSA behaviors than monochronic salespeople.…”

“…First, prior literature on ambidexterity focuses on motivations as a key determinant of sales-service ambidexterity (DeCarlo and Lam 2016; Sok, Sok, and De Luca 2016; Yu, Patterson, and de Ruyter 2013). However, previous research acknowledges that salesperson preferences for time use are critical when the management of multiple tasks (e.g., selling additional products, problem resolution) is the norm (Fournier et al 2013). We address this knowledge gap by proposing that ambidextrous behaviors are not only driven by state motivations but also by the salesperson’s preferred time structure for work tasks (i.e., polychronicity).…”

Salesperson directive modification intention: a conceptualization and empirical validation

“…While not as heavily researched, the organization itself also has the potential to create role conflict (e.g. Fournier et al 2013). We posit that at least one of these areas may create dissonance for a boundary spanner when s/he disagrees with a directive aimed at controlling behavior received from her/his organization, motivating directive modification intentions.…”

Mobile social networking and salesperson maladaptive dependence behaviors

“…This increased access to information makes the individual more dependent on technology to achieve his/her goals (Ball-Rokeach, 1985). Role stress exists when individuals experience role ambiguity and role conflict (e.g., Fournier et al, 2013;Rizzo et al, 1970). Role conflict occurs when a salesperson perceives that different groups' expectancies and demands are contradictory and cannot be satisfied at the same time, leading the individual to feel torn in multiple directions (e.g., Onyemah, 2008;Rizzo et al, 1970).…”