Coping with Work Stress, Work Satisfaction, and Social Support: An Interpretive Study of Life Insurance Agents

Abstract

The life insurance industry began in England as early as 1756, yet agents as an occupation to sell insurance directly to the public did not appear until 1840, and mostly in the United States (Leigh-Bennett, 1936:59; Kessler, 1985:14). The agent was not invented by the industry as a marketing device but was, rather, a response to the strong and powerful resistance of soci ety (Zelizer, 1983:17). The industry in the United States expanded con siderably in the late nineteenth century due to rapid economic growth, urbanization and popular education; one saw keen competition among companies and agents for the client dollar. Some agents resorted to unfair and sometimes illegal sales tactics that resulted in further public hostility, rejection and distrust of life insurance agents. Such public stigmatization was recorded in the United States as early as 1870. Zelizer (1983:146) wrote, Illegitimate practices were abolished, codes of ethics were pub lished, professional associations organized and agents better trained. Yet the stigma endured. Since its diffusion into Singapore in 1908 (Neo, 1996:37), the life insur ance industry has relied on agents to negotiate the cultural resistance to discussing the proposition of death and its implications, especially among the Chinese (Neo, 1996:37; Lee, 1994:6; Leong, 1985:178). Han (1979:44) wrote, . . everyone needs life assurance, but very few people do anything on their own to buy it. The agent was thus invented to deal with the public rejecting life insurance as a concept and as a commodity; in doing this work, agents were given a share of the profit: commissions (Chua, 1971:42; Neo, 1996:38). Hundreds of workers were lured into the life insur ance industry, and away from the wage-earning class, whereby an agent's work offers the rather attractive prospect of self-employment and its promise of work autonomy and potentially high monetary rewards -— a sort of flight from the proletariat class. In her autobiography, Chen (1998), a well-known agent in the life insurance industry of Singapore, singled out one stressor factor associated with her work: rejection by prospective clients and avoidance by close friends. In the book, she wrote of her husband, also an agent, being chased