Content area
Full text
The authors study how salespeople cope with social anxiety during customer contacts and find that two tactics, sale perseverance and task concentration, ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions. Both coping tactics, however, are differentially moderated by strength of felt physiological sensations and strength of negative expectations and thoughts. Salespeople experiencing anxiety cognitions should distract themselves by concentrating on their task to free up their thinking in relation to the task at hand. Engaging in behaviors to modify the situation by persevering on the sale, on the other hand, occupies action space and should be the coping strategy of choice for those salespeople confronting physiological sensations in relation to felt anxiety. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 171 salespersons.
Keywords: sales call anxiety; coping; task concentration; sale perseverance; salesforce management
Social anxiety is an intrusive, pervasive emotion in social situations and consists of three components: negative expectations and thoughts (i.e., anxiety cognitions), felt physiological sensations, and urges to perform protective (as opposed to assertive or inquisitive) actions (e.g., Leary and Kowalski 1995). Psychologically, protective actions are potentially the most damaging aspect of social anxiety, because they negatively affect the perceived self-competence of a person and lead to self-reinforcing cyclic behaviors that perpetuate anxiety (Wells et al. 1995).
Verbeke and Bagozzi (2000, 2003) investigated the negative consequences of social anxiety in sales interactions, labeling it sales call anxiety (SCA). Practitioners estimate that up to 40 percent of salespeople suffer from intense levels of SCA at some point in their careers (Ray 1995). Recent research has found that more than 60 percent of salespeople suffer on occasion from SCA, even if only at a moderate level (Verbeke, Belschak, and Bagozzi 2004). Despite the high incidence of SCA, so far no research has been done on how to cope with SCA and overcome its negative consequences.
In the psychology literature on anxiety, two streams of research can be identified: the first focuses on the cognitive aspects of anxiety (e.g., Wells and Matthews 1994), and the second concentrates on the underlying physiological processes (e.g., LeDoux 1995) as main drivers of anxiety and protective actions. Consistent with these streams of research, psychologists have proposed seemingly contradictory recommendations for coping. For example, Foa and Kozak (1986) conceived of thought distraction as...