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Effect of stress on sales person performance

By Khan, Noheed,Riaz, Muhammad Tayyeb,Bashir, Hasnain,Iftekhar,

Hanan,Khattak, Arif 

Published on AllBusiness.cominShare

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HEADNOTE

Abstract

We examined the relationships between sale employees' felt job stress, organization

commitment, job experience, and performance. Our results are reliable with the

consideration view of stress. Employees with higher levels of emotional commitment

and higher levels of job experience channeled felt stress more effectively into sales

 performance. Felt stress had neutral to negative effects on performance for employeeswith lower levels of commitment and job experience. Commitment, like stress, was

more strongly related to performance when employees had more job experience. The

results suggest that consideration of moderators of the stress-performance

relationships important both theoretically and practically.

Keywords: Stress, Commitment, Job experience, Performance

Introduction

Stress at work place is a critical problem for employer employee and society. Problem

at work are more strongly inter link with health complaints than are any other lifestressor more so than even financial problems. Stress on individual generate strain on

organization as whole and organization experiences stress as funding change s loss of 

 programming, down sizing ,mergers, and mostly strain individual coping skill. The

national institute for health occupational safety and health (NIOSH) define job stress

as the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when requirement of job

do not mach the capabilities, resources or need of worker. Katz and Kahn, 1966 and

House and Litzman, 1970, represent stress theory when employees experience role of 

ambiguity and role of conflict are also refer to stressor.

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Changes place worker unfamiliar job cause previously loyal worker to question their 

commitment to their employer and challenges worker to perform under stress.

(Hunter,Bernhardt,Hughes,& Skurtowicz,2001 :Korczynski & Ott,2005Most research

suggest that role ambiguity is needed negatively correlated with job satisfaction, job

involvement performance tension propensity to leave the job and job performance

variables.

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The multidimensional approaches to the study of role ambiguity began with Bedeian

and Armenakis (1981) and have continued with Sawyer (1992) and Singh, Verbeke,

and Rhoads (1996). Based on their findings and the foundation provided by these

works there are four (4) widely accepted dimensions to role ambiguity, which may be

experienced by the role incumbents, and are based on the role incumbent's

 perspective.

Literature review

Today's Pakistani economy is facing a new challenges in marketing due to this global

changes in big world managerial level employees is taking a competitive disadvantage

 but sales person employees is facing a stress. A theory of organizational role stress

recommended that role stress may be dependent upon organizational structure and

culture,(Schuler 1977). Organization culture is collected of values ,as well as sample

of behavior, attitudes, supposition and artifact (Jackson, Schlacter, and Wolf, 1995)

Shared ethic between the sales force and organization give a out line or view of 

system for decision making and present a central theme to direct sales person

,behavior (Jackson,schlacter,and wolf 1995)

A study shown that sales people with low level shared ethic with their group may

experience high level of tension and job nervousness (Posner, Kouzes, and Schmidt

1985). Main causes of organization stress are role of ambiguity, and role of conflict,

 between the most common researched construct in organizational behavior (Boles and

Bab in 1994: Sullivan and Bhagat 1992) and managing of sales force (Leigh, Pullin,

and Comer 2001)

Role of ambiguity show when emploees are ambiguous about their duties and proceeding required their jobs (Wallker, Chrchill, and Foed 1975) most important to

feeling of attention (Onyemah 2008). Role of conflict show when emploees

distinguish that group opportunities and demands are mismatched and can not be all

together satisfied (Walker, Churchill and Ford 1975). It is occurs, for example when

sales people suppose that their managers s hope and demand are not well- matched

with their custumer hope and demands (Onyemah 2008)

One of study shown the stress negative influence an employee job satisfaction (e.g,

Jaramillo and Solomn 2006).Extending of past research found the relationship

 between role conflict, ambiguity, and work family conflict with fact of job satisfaction

related to gender .They establish that gender of the sales persons does effect therelationship of role conflict, role of ambiguity, and work family conflict on few of 

facets of job satisfaction. (Boles, Wood, and Johnson, 2003)

For example, as role ambiguity and role conflict harmfully affect satisfaction with

recompense for male sales persons, female sales person's satisfaction with pay not

unfair by the role of ambiguity and role conflict. They also established work family

conflict does not affect the male sales peoples satisfaction with coworkers, even it has

negative relationship for female sales persons also while work family conflict is

negative relationship with satisfaction with promotion and organization policy for 

male and female sales persons, no important relationship and was established for their 

female counterpart (Boles, Wood, and Johnson, 2003).

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Main Effect of stress

Commonly, stress refers to an emotional experience related with anxiety, tension, and

strain (cf. Cooke & Rousseau, 1984). A Study on stress features a mixture of 

approaches to its conceptualization, its background, and its belongings. Stressors can

  be understood as "stimuli that evoke the stress process" (LePine, Podsakoff, &LePine, 2005: 764). Workers subject to alike stressors may vary in the coverage to

which they feel nervousness or tension as a result of personal experiences or 

accomplishments in their work setting (Parker & De-Cotiis, 1983). ). These types of 

feelings can be described as "strain" (Van Dyne, Jehn, & Cummings2002) or as "felt

 job stress" (Motowidlo, Packard, &Manning, 1986; Parker & DeCotiis, 1983). FeIt

 job stress refers to logic of time pressure, anxiety, and concern that is related with job

tasks. The mere occurrence of stressors does not automatically lead to such felt stress.

Individuals may suffer stressors or scatter their effects either cognitively or 

 behaviorally, and thus felt job stress can be familiar both from stressors and from

 physiological symptoms. The attention theory of stress suggests that there should be a

  positive association between felt job stress and job performance. Extensiveexperimental research supports Easterbrook's (1959) argument that although stress

depletes an individual's resources, it paradoxically has the effect of concentrating

remaining resources on the task at hand (Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas,

1999).

Yet workplace-based evidence for a relationship between felt job stress and job

 performance is weak and conflicting (Beehr, 1995; Jex, 1998).In this section result of 

insufficient notice to the Sources of stress. LePine and his colleagues (2005) showed

during meta-analysis that stressors that are hindrance-oriented (e.g., organizational

 politics, red tape, role ambiguity) are negatively related to job performance, butchallenge-oriented stressors (e.g., high workload, time pressure, job scope).

Encourage workers and can be positively associated to job performance even as they

suggest other strains such as exhaustion and tiredness. There are likely to be

restrictions to the range, even in reaction to challenges, within which improved stress

results in the fruitful redirection of attention. Researchers have long recommended

such limits: Yerkes and Dodson (1908) hypothesized an inverted U-shaped

association between stresses and performance. Lepine et al. (2005) argued that

countervailing negative sound effects of strains can accompany positive effects of felt

stress consequential from challenges to achieve, even when hindrance stressors are

not present. As persons devote growing awareness to symptoms of stress such as

exhaustion, they may become less able to give the focused awareness to the task athand that, attention theory suggests, will drive performance. The reason of the

consideration approach implies not presently limits to the stress-performance

association, but possible moderators of that association. Attention theory distinguishes

 between jobs or task attributes that are to be responded to and attributes that are to be

unnoticed. Individuals who feel stress organize their attention differentially, so that

 performance on attributes of the extent requiring an answer may increase even as

responses to ignorable scope diminish sharply (Matthews & Margetts, 1991). The

attention approach is complete significant when an assigned task has a high priority

for an individual and when the task is familiar to the individual (Easterbrook, 1959;

Matthews & Margetts, 199 ^Organizational settening commitments and job

experience are possible to moderate the stress performance relationship.Commitments (which leads individuals to struggle toward organizational goals) and

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experiences (which breeds task knowledge) each should guide individuals to focus

more significantly on job performance under stress. We therefore turn next to

discussions of these possible moderators and associated hypotheses concerning their 

effects on performance.

Commitment as a Moderator of the Stress-Performance Relationship

Commitment has been studied broadly and has been theoretically linked to work 

outcomes such as job performance and absenteeism. At least six meta-analyses

address the relationship between Commitment and performance (Cohen, 1991;

Jaramillo, Mulki, & Marshall, 2005; Mathieu & Zajac, 1990; Randall, 1990; Riketta,

2002; Wright & Bonett, 2002).

Regardless of extensive research and strong theoretical reasons to expect that

individuals with higher levels of organizational commitment will achieve better,

verification of this relationship is, surprisingly, mixed (Mowday, Porter, & Steers,

1982; Wright & Bonett, 2002). Refinement the commitments build helps to determine

some of the incompatible results. For example, many studies of the commitment-

 performance association have used a commitment construct that encompasses both

affective and calculative magnitude (Siders, George, & Dharwadkar, 2001). Studies

straightening out these two magnitude specify that job performance should be unfair 

more heavily by affective commitment, "the relation strength of an individual's

recognition with and involvement in a particular organization" (Mowday, Porter, &

Steers, 1982: 27) than by calculative commitment, which encompasses investments in

continued employment and tends to control turnover (Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993).

Subsequent this logic, we focus on affective commitment, which has been shown to

 be absolutely related to organizationally satisfied job performance (Siders et al.,2001).

Jex (1998), in work for more research on element that affect the stress-performance

association, stable specifically to organizational commitment as a possible moderator 

of this relationship. The attention approach necessities the rationale for such an effect:

according to attention theory, performance will be unfair by the extent to which

workers under stress recognize key work tasks as attributes of a job that merit the

expenditure of limited resources, relatively than as distractions to be ignored.

Commitment influences job performance during recognition and internalization.

Affectively devoted individuals classify with an organization and so adopt attitudesand behaviors allowed by the organization in order to demonstrate a satisfying, self-

defining association with it (Becker, Billings, Eveleth, & Gilbert, 1996). Further, they

feebly accept the values and goals of the organization and exert effort toward these

goals (Mayer & Schoorman, 1992; Porter et al., 1974). Workers who are highly

dedicated to their organization are consequently more likely, when under stress, to

direct their difficult task toward important work tasks and to reduce resources devoted

to other activities.

Employees with low commitment, in contrast, may respond to felt stress by ignoring

work tasks and with holding effort (Jamal, 1984, 1985). Several studies have provided

indirect support for the idea that commitment influences the direction of attentionunder stress. Begley and Czajka (1993) showed that stress had negative effects on job

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satisfaction and a merged measure of job "displeasure" only when employees also had

low organizational commitment. Similarly, Siu and Cooper (1998) establish that

commitment moderated the effect of felt job stress on job satisfaction as well as on

self-reported psychological suffering, such asstrain. And Jamal (1985).Previous

reseches show the negative relationship between felt stress and supervisor assed job

  performance for individual with low commitments: Did not test with highcommitment but he did not formerly test between two groups. No past researches

have specially tested the effect of the stress-commitment interaction on job

 performance.

Job Experience as a Moderator of the Stress-Performance

Relationship

Human capital theory (Becker, 1962) suggests that more experienced employees

recognize better than employees new to a job, because they accrue skills in the job.

Tenure in a job is positively connected with performance because "experience provides the medium for learning" (Schmidt, Hunter, & Outerbridge, 1986: 167).

Schmidt and Hunter (2004) reviewed the general facts in support of the link 

connecting experience and performance. Experience has a bigger contact on

 performance when workers have relatively low tenure and still understand their jobs;

the positive relationship between experience and performance typically declines as

workers gain experience (Schmidt & Hunter, 2004)

The observe view suggests that experience and stress are likely to influence job

 performance jointly. Experience facilitate the cognitive simplification of job related

routines and behaviors (Earley, Lee, & Hanson, 1990),Baron (1986) established that

felt stress is more likely to facilitate aspects of performance that have been welllearned, because individuals under stress are more likely to direct their notice to tasks

that they understand. Usually, because job experience is linked with learning and

increased capability, experienced employees under stress are more likely than

inexperienced Employees to direct their attention to tasks that are middle to their job.

Van Dyne and her colleagues (2002), for example, establish that hair stylists

 performed better under high job stress, theorize that the stylists focused on habitual

actions. Van Dyne et al. did not, however, analyze the extent to which job experience

moderated the stress-performance association, and the mean tenure of the workers

they studied was quite high (six years). The attention view recognizes that lessexperienced employees could be less successful under stress.

As Jex (1998) noted, less experienced employees are less able to direct their limited

resources toward job tasks. Until employees have accumulated enough experience to

understand how to do their jobs, stress may be negatively associated with

 performance. As competence grows with experience, the negative effects of felt stress

on performance should diminish. Most of research examining the effects of 

experience has used job and organizational experience interchangeably, these two

types s of experience have differing theoretical implications with respect to our 

variables of interest and are thus not simple proxies for one another.

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In difference to the limited empirical research into moderators of the effects of stress

on workplace performance, the theoretical and empirical literature on the

commitment-performance relationship and its moderators, including experience

(Wright & Bonett, 2002), is general here we quit briefly from our focus on attention

theory and felt stress to think the contact between job experience and commitment, for 

two reasons. First, even after many studies and several metaanalyses, evidence on theinteractive effects of job experience and commitment on performance remains mixed

Our study sheds additional light on the argument. Second, we will return to attention

theory in considering a three-way interaction between stress, commitment, and

experience, and it is essential to include all lower terms (two-way interactions as well

as main effects) in modeling such interactions (Aiken & West, 1991). Cohen (1991)

theorized that the buildup of skills through experience positively moderates the effects

of commitment on performance, screening that the commitment-performance

relationship was stronger in late career than in mid career. Cohen's meta-analysis did

not differentiate affective commitment from other forms of commitment, but that of 

Riketta (2002) specifically studied moderators of the relationship between affectivecommitment and job performance and, in contrast to Cohen's, recognized no

moderating effects of tenure. Wright and Bonnet's (2002) meta-analysis, in contrast to

 both Ricotta' s and Cohen's results, uncovered important, negative moderating effects

of experience on the commitment-performance relationship. Per the logic of attention

theory, higher job performance under stress results when individuals direct limited

resources to tasks that are essential to job performance and ignore tasks that are not

central to performing well on the job. After the assessment of literature review present

study has some questions for solve of those question we developed four hypotheses.

Hypothesis

Hypothesis 1.

High organizational commitment moderates the relationship between felt stress and

 job performance. Stress is positively associated with performance when commitment

is relatively high and negatively associated with performance when commitment

isrelatively low.

Hypothesis 2.

Job experience moderates the relationship between felt stress and job performance.Stress is positively associated with performance when job experience is relatively

high and negatively associated with performance when job experience is relatively

low.

Hypothesis 3.

Job experience moderates the relationship between affective organizational

commitment and job performance. The positive relationship between commitment and

 performance is of the greatest magnitude when job experience is high

Hypothesis 4.

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Job experience moderates the relationship between felt job stresses, high commitment,

and job performance. The (expected) positive interaction between stress and

commitment is of the greatest magnitude when job experience is high.

Research Methodology

We used qualitative technique for analysis of hypothesis. Quantitative and qualitative

research methods can be distinguished. According to Merriam (1998) Quality or 

quantity methods researchers can control. Yin. (2003) both quantitative methods or 

statistics and numerical data based on where most results are truly felt as hard

scientific data, distinguishes deal with research. quality social sciences where Jesus

idea, and human behavior as in research with soft data is about.

The goal was not discover the relationship between stress and performances also

check the commitment of sales person employees.. For this purpose consequently

individual semi structured interviews was chosen. The interview was conducted of all

through face to face in the three manufacturing industries in Faisalabad. Interviews

were conducted with in detail and outline the issues on the basis of fifteen questions

were put through a comprehensive review of the literature, the interview questions

that focus on three main areas: 1) Stress, (2) Performance (3) Commitment, job exper 

Discussion and Practical Application

Hypothesis 1.

The sale employee's behaviors show that 80% of sale employees feel organizational

commitment create stress. This stress effect the sales person performance. Other 20%sales person's sales employees do not agree those employees' s behavior. Sale person

employees show behavior when employees have high loyalty within organization then

they feel high stress.When employees have low loyalty within organization then they

feel low stress. This stress always affect the performance. When employees show high

loyalty within organization then they do hard work for organization. Basically they

feel we are more loyal then other. When sales employees feel stress because they

frustrated. When sales employees feel low loyalty within organization then balance

their work. When they do not feel stress.

Hypothesis 2.

The result indicate the sale employees behavior 70% are behave job experience create

a stress .This stress effect the sale person employees. Other 30% employees do not

agree those employees behavior. Sale person employees show that high job

experience employees feel high stress and low job experience employees have high

 performance with low stress.

The reason shows employees that high experience sale employees having high salary.

He can not get this salary to other organization easily due to this he feels stress. When

employees have low job experience then they feel stress because they can not get

same job to other employer due to low experience. Due to this fear they feel stress.

Hypothesis 3.

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Sale employees show their behaviors: job experience effect the employee's

commitment within organization and due to commitment effect the employee

 performance. Other they do not agree this behavior. When employees have more

experience then show high commitment within organization. This high commitment

improves the employee's performance. Commitment and job experience have positive

relationship.

Hypothesis 4.

The result indicates, job experience effects the high commitment and stress, and 70%

employees act their behavior. When employee feel high job experience then he shows

high commitment within the organization.Due to high commitment he can not balance

at work then he feels stress. When employees have low job experience then they show

low commitment within organization because they can do balace at work due to this

they can perform better as compared to other.

Conclusion

This study examines the relationship between the stress and performance and also

checks the moderating effect on both. Organizational commitment creates stress due

to stress effect the sales person performance. When sales employees show high

commitment then they feel more stress. Result also indicate high job create high

stress. Job experience effect the employee's commitment. High job experience

employees have high commitment within the organization and low job experience

employees have low commitments. Job experience effect the organizational

commitment and job performance.