Understanding Conditions of Sales Force Frustration

This article attempts to advance the personal selling and sales management literature by analyzing the negative consequences that may emanate from salespeople’s daily work experiences. The overall purpose of this article is to detect holistic workplace conditions, which result in frustration experiences in the sales force. Frustration is associated with an emotional reaction caused by an event or situation that interferes with an individual’s ability to accomplish his or her day-to-day duties effectively (Keenan and Newton 1984; Spector 1999). Drawing on role theory and social identity theory, and based on previous empirical research on sales management, we focus on two major sets of factors when seeking to explain conditions resulting in frustration in the sales force. Specifically, the objective of this article is to examine how salespeople’s perceptions of role stress (Singh et al. 1994), that is, role conflict, role ambiguity and role overload, and social conflict (Spector 1987), that is, intragroup conflict, intergroup conflict, and supervisor conflict, influence the development of frustration in the workplace.

This study proposes that the extent to which salespeople experience frustration at work differs based on the degree to which their work conditions are characterized by role stress and social conflicts. This notion implies that role stressors and social conflicts combine to constellations of work environments, which result in sales force frustration. In addition, this notion implies that the presence of single frustrators may not necessarily lead to frustration. However, the existence of multiple combined factors in a work environment may unleash the effects of single frustrators and by so doing increase the experience of frustration. The question that arises is: What do such constellations of work environments look like? To answer this question, we employed a fuzzy set approach and analyzed the higher-order interactions between role stressors and social conflicts to understand frustration in the sales force.

Data were collected in a web-based survey with salespeople from multiple firms. In sum, 118 respondents participated in the survey. Data analysis started with the estimation of the measurement model. After that, we performed a fsQCA using the fs/QCA software program (Ragin et al. 2007). The results from this study reveal four configurations of factors leading to sales force frustration that differ to the extent to which dimensions of role stress and social conflict exist. Coverage values for these configurations reveal an overall value of the combined configurations of 59 %, which indicates that a substantial proportion of the outcome is ‘explained’ by the four configurations. In addition, the results reveal that supervisor conflict appears to be one of the most critical factors resulting in sales force frustration as it is a core factor in three of the four configurations. In sum, this study shows that frustration is likely to occur in situations where both perceptions of role stress and social conflict combine to workplace situations which overwhelm salespeople.