Salesperson’s Resilience and its Effect on Sales Performance in the Presence of Ambiguity-Based Role Stress and the Interplay with Proactivity: An Abstract

Abstract

Across existing sales studies role ambiguity is a stable antecedent of sales performance and exhibits significant negative effects. While existing sales research focuses on the consequences of ambiguity-based role stress, it is neglected to identify psychological resources that enable salespeople to deal effectively with role ambiguity. Complementing existing research, we consider a seller’s psychological state of resilience that may buffer the negative consequences of role ambiguity on sales performance. For a deeper insight into this effect of resilience, we refer to the mechanisms of the role ambiguity-sales performance relationship and, therefore, propose that the negative effect of role ambiguity on sales performance is mediated by a seller’s personal accomplishment and work engagement. In addition, we incorporate a seller’s proactivity as a condition of resilience and investigate its impact on resilience’s effect. For the investigation of the compensatory effect of resilience we conducted two online surveys. 142 salespeople participated in study 1 and 175 salesmen attended study 2. The respondents of both studies were randomly selected from an address database or from professional networks and recruited via e-mail. The objective of study 1 was to examine the effect of resilience in the mediated role ambiguity-sales performance process, while the evaluation of its robustness and the analysis of the interaction effect of resilience and proactivity were the aim of study 2. Results confirm the beneficial effect of resilience for sales performance in the presence of role ambiguity. At this, resilience buffers the negative indirect effect of role ambiguity through personal accomplishment and, in parts, through work engagement. However, there is some evidence that a seller’s proactivity might be a boundary condition of the compensatory effect of resilience. Our findings complement existing research on the role ambiguity-sales performance relationship that mostly neglected to explore psychological resources that buffer the negative effects of role ambiguity. With resilience we introduce a psychological resource that buffers the negative effects of role ambiguity on sales performance and enables sellers to deal effectively with ambiguity-based role stress. In doing so, resilience constitutes interpersonal differences within the same selling situation, and thus, is an important addition in order to better understand the process from situational characteristics to sales performance. Moreover, we reveal a process model of the role ambiguity-sales performance relationship that incorporates a seller’s personal accomplishment and work engagement. In contrast to existing research that widely assumed a direct relationship we offer a deeper understanding of the interplay between ambiguity and sales performance.