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Sales personnel play a key role in the success of organizations. These individuals present services/products to clients, manage accounts, build relationships, maintain existing business relationships, and must be available for frequent interactions with clients. Business operations are linked to external entities through these activities, suggesting sales groups play a critical role in the success of an organization. As a representative to the external market, sales personnel are subject to unique stressors due to role-specific requirements. These stressors can impact the ability of sales professionals to effectively engage with customers and manage the volatility of financial performance, especially in commission-based compensation structures. Thus, organizations can find utility in identifying sales candidates with higher levels of stress tolerance, who can handle negative client interactions, overcome lulls in sales conversions, and avoid the impact of occupational stressors on long-term sales performance. Research suggests that organizations can use personality to predict stress tolerance as a component of sales performance. To provide organizations with insights into sales-specific coping behaviors associated with stress tolerance, the authors (1) discuss stress inducing factors (stressors) associated with sales role performance, (2) review the individual differences associated with stress tolerance, (3) present personality relationships with sales performance and stress tolerance, and (4) present job-analytic support for stress tolerance competencies relevant to sales performance and criterion-related validity evidence linking personality characteristics to those behaviors. The authors conclude with a discussion around the potential for applied uses of personality in identifying sales personnel with greater likelihoods of exhibiting stress tolerant behaviors in the workplace.

The preponderance of studies that rely on self-report for both independent (e.g. stressors) and dependent (e.g. well-being) variables is often deplored, as it creates problems of common method variance, which may lead to inflated, or even spurious, correlations and predictions. It is sometimes suggested that alternative measures should yield more “objective” information on the phenomena under investigation. We discuss this issue with regard to: (a) observational measures of working conditions; (b) physiological measures of strain; and (c) event-based “self-observation” on a micro-level. We argue that these methods are not necessarily “objective.” Like self-report, they are influenced by a plethora of factors; and measurement artifacts can easily be produced. All this can make their interpretation quite difficult, and the conclusion that lack of convergence with self-report automatically invalidates self-report is not necessarily warranted. Especially with regard to physiological measures, one has to keep in mind that they refer to a different response level that follows its own laws and is only loosely coupled with psychological responses. Therefore, replacement is not a promising way to get more reliable estimates of stressor-strain relationships. We argue instead that each method contains both substantive and error variance, and that a combination of various methods seems more auspicious. After discussing advantages and pitfalls of observational, physiological, and self-observational measures, respectively, we report empirical examples from our own research on each of these methods, which are meant to illustrate both the advantages and the problems associated with them. They strengthen the overall conclusion that there is no “substitute” for self-report (which often is necessary to be able to interpret data from other methods, most notably physiological ones). They also illustrate that collecting such data is quite cumbersome, and that a number of conditions have to be carefully considered before using them, and we report some problems we encountered in this research. Altogether, we conclude that self-report measures, if carefully constructed, are better than their reputation, but that the optimal way is to complement them with other measures.

Work organizations and the employees within these organizations face considerable environmental pressures requiring adaptive change. Several forces have contributed to this need for great adaptation. These are described in many excellent sources (e.g., Cascio, 2003; Ilgen & Pulakos, 1999); here we briefly review their implications for individual adaptability.

Occupational stress is common in the workplace and leads to various negative outcomes such as burnout, turnover, and medical problems. Although occupational stress is associated with negative connotations, it also can foster workplace resiliency. Workplace resiliency involves the ability to recover quickly in the face of adversity. Emotionally laborious jobs, or jobs in which employees must modify, manage, or regulate their emotions as part of their work role, are inherently stressful. Thus, such jobs, while stress-inducing, may also offer employees opportunities to become more resilient at work. Currently, display rules, rules encouraging the suppression and expression of certain emotions, dictate workplace emotions and thus, interactions. Ultimately, display rule adherence makes it difficult for employees engaging in emotional labor to build resilience. In this chapter, the authors detail how and when emotional labor encounters lead to episodic and prolonged workplace resilience. Specifically, the authors outline instances in which employees engaging in emotional labor can create and sustain workplace resiliency by not deploying an acting strategy and instead, breaking character. The authors further discuss individual and organizational factors that may impact this process as well such as personality and organizational culture that serve as potential boundary conditions to workplace resilience capacity. The authors conclude with implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Prior research has documented a generally positive relationship between employees’ standing on constructs that are commonly studied by positive psychologists and workplace outcomes, such as job performance and retention. Constructs such as adaptability, empowerment, hope, optimism, and resilience are believed to reflect psychological resources that employees can draw upon when facing adversity and challenges in their work, while also reflecting a general tendency or disposition to experience positive emotions and engage with others in ways that reflect such positive emotions. As such, positive psychology constructs may be particularly important for performance in jobs characterized by high levels of social interaction, stress, and challenge. In order to explore the manner in which different positive psychology constructs are related to sales performance, this chapter presents findings from a meta-analytic investigation into the relationships between sales performance and a variety of positive psychology constructs. Findings based on data from 59 unique samples and 14,334 salespeople indicate that some positive psychology constructs exhibit moderate to even strong relationships with the performance of salespeople, although the strength of these relationships appears to have been substantially inflated by common-source bias. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for selection and training within sales occupations, and advance an agenda for future research.

This study investigates the potential of utilizing mindfulness practices to regulate emotions in libraries. Libraries are emotionally stressful environments characterized by continuous change and uncertainty. Working with the public and with colleagues can lead to emotional strain and exhaustion. Mindfulness offers librarians a means to achieve a degree of emotional control so they do not identify with emotions, allowing them to focus more fully on their work. This study examines the scientific research that has been conducted on mindfulness and the effect it has on emotions. The research is drawn from the fields of psychology and related fields such as medicine. The findings are applied to the library field to examine what the potential implications might be. Psychological studies have shown that mindfulness has the potential to effectively manage emotions in the workplace and in organizational settings. Mindfulness practices help individuals manage emotions by a process of attuning to and dis-identifying with affective content, leaving them free to concentrate on the task at hand. Psychological science has found mindfulness to be useful for managing emotions. These findings have potential implications for libraries. By applying mindfulness to the library setting, this study provides librarians with an effective strategy for regulating emotions and coping with work-related stress.

In this chapter, we argue that despite the fact that empirical research on trait neuroticism has shown fairly weak relations between the broad neuroticism trait and overall job performance, organizational research can benefit by increased attention to the neuroticism construct. This is because the influence of neuroticism on work behavior can be best understood by separating the more general neuroticism domain into its lower level facets. We discuss various conceptualizations of neuroticism and then review existing research on the relation between the facets of neuroticism and job performance. Next, we turn our attention to a theoretical framework that suggests that the relations between neuroticism facets and job performance outcomes are explained by the social, cognitive, and behavioral effects of having varying levels of neuroticism-based traits. In so doing, we not only focus on mediated relationships between facets of neuroticism and job performance dimensions but also recognize some important moderators, as well as some expected direct relations between the facets and job performance. Finally, we discuss implications for further conceptual development, offer some suggestions for testing the propositions, and discuss potential practical implications of finding support for this model.