The effect of environmental job demand on salespeople’s psychological responses

In more complex sales environments, salespeople experience high levels of job stress. Our objectives were to examine how environmental job demand (e.g., customer demandingness) affects salespeople’s psychological responses, and to identify potential factors that can reduce the psychological costs to salespeople. We gathered data from 257 salespeople working in pharmaceutical companies in the Republic of Korea. The results indicated that customer demandingness leads to role conflict which, in turn, has a negative impact on job satisfaction. Additionally, the results showed that the collaboration between marketing and sales departments negatively predicted role conflict. As a unique highlight of this study, we identified marketing–sales collaboration as a moderator of the relationship between job demand and psychological response. This insight sheds new light on our understanding of the dynamics among these variables, and has valuable implications for both theory and practice.