The Role of Coping in Salespeople’s Satisfaction and Its Effect on Salespeople’s Ethics

Stress affects the health of salespeople on a regular basis. It is a weapon of mass destruction as three out of every four workes all over the world consider their work as stressful. It contributes to over 100,000 deaths every year. Thus, it is resulting in becoming a very important topic to study. As salespeople deal with different roles in their daily job and experience role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload, they are subjected to stress more than other employees of any company do. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that different ways of coping have a different influence on job satisfaction and life satisfaction of salespeople. This paper develops a theoretical model that focuses on the extent to which coping may enhance sales people's job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Based on data collected from 471 salespeople in the US, I conclude that those salespeople that use the right form of coping will end up enhancing job satisfaction and life satisfaction. My model reveals that the efficient form of coping has a major influence in enhancing job satisfaction. A great way to deal with these negative outcomes of sales job is to cope with the stress on a regular basis. Salespeople who take a positive approach or also called a problem-focused approach tend to deal with the stress in much better form; they attack the root cause of it and tend to increase job satisfaction and life satisfaction. While those who take a negative approach or an emotion-focused approach, tend to show a negative effect of stress and display a lower incidence of job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Employees of the companies and especially managers need to be educated on these topics so that when problems arise, they will be prepared to handle them in a manner that will maximize the organization's productivity and reduce stress. The employees should be taught to cope with stress in a positive manner and should be taught to take a problem-focused approach to coping.