Examining impacts of technostress on the professional salesperson's behavioural performance

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of technostress in the professional sales area and shows it to be a possible reason for low technology-enabled behavioural performance of professionals in the sales function. Integrating literature from sales, technostress and social cognitive theory, we examine relationships between technostress creators, role stress, technology-enabled innovation and technology-enabled performance. We hypothesize that technostress adversely affects the technology-enabled performance of the salesperson through two distinct paths, one by increasing role stress and two, by decreasing technology-enabled innovation. We further examine the role of factors that mitigate these adverse effects. We find that organizational technostress-inhibiting mechanisms negatively moderate the positive relationship between technostress creators and role stress, and technology self-efficacy dampens the negative association of technostress and technology-enabled innovation. We also find that technology-enabled innovation enhances technology-enabled performance. Our results are based on survey data collected from 237 institutional sales professionals. Theoretical contributions and practice-based implications of findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• technology-enabled salesperson performance
• technology-enabled innovation
• technostress
• technology self-efficacy
• technostress inhibitors

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