It’s about time (management)!: Role overload as a bridge explaining relationships between helping, voice, and objective sales performance

Abstract

Although organizations benefit from employees’ discretionary behaviors such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), there are personal costs associated with these behaviors. These can include work-related strains that lead to negative job performance consequences. We develop and test a conceptual model to explain why these negative consequences emerge, and among which employees they may be most likely. Building from the implications of resource allocation theory, we frame role overload (i.e., insufficient time to complete work tasks) as a mediator of the indirect relationships between discretionary behaviors and downstream objective sales performance, and time management skill as a moderator of this indirect relationship. In a lagged, multi-source field study of 302 sales employees, and 74 supervisors, we find that time management skill can offset experienced role overload associated with helping and voice behaviors. These results speak to the critical role of resource allocation competence for predicting downstream objective sales performance consequences associated with discretionary behaviors like helping and voice. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our results.