Does Your Company Care about the Fears of Pandemic for Salespeople? Insights from Pandemic Demands and Resources

Abstract

The pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) disrupt the roles of all professionals, particularly those of salespeople. This study seeks to empirically examine how fears amidst the pandemic, as pandemic demands, influence salespeople’s attitudinal and behavioral outcomes and how organizational and personal resources as pandemic resources mitigate the negative outcomes for salespeople. Building on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and employing the partial least squares-based structural equation modeling, this study tested the proposed hypotheses using responses from 237 salespeople in South Korea. The results mainly supported hypotheses. As a major theoretical contribution, this study delineates Pandemic fears in terms of salespeople’s fear of themselves, their jobs, and companies, and the ultimate consequences of fear on salespeople’s affective and behavioral outcomes. This study offers important evidence to sales and retail managers regarding the significance of pandemic resources as important interventions to minimize the challenges of the pandemic for salespeople.