Polychronicity and Scheduling’s Role in Reducing Role Stress and Enhancing Sales Performance

Abstract

Organizations can pursue a competitive advantage by guarding and enhancing one of its most precious marketplace assets—the sales force. Hiring salespeople who are suited for their role is critical within an increasingly global and competitive environment, and doing so generates dividends for increasing sales force retention, sales productivity, and performance. In addition to effective recruiting, reducing role stress is one way to achieve an acceptable sales force retention rate. Today salespeople must overcome the now frazzled pace of a hypercompetitive selling environment and splice their time effectively across customers and opportunities. This study introduces the impact that polychronicity—an employee’s preference for switching between multiple tasks within the same block of time—has on job performance and the components of role stress, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Findings demonstrate that a polychronic orientation has a positive impact on performance and a negative impact on role ambiguity. A salesperson’s propensity for scheduling and meeting deadlines reveals similar effects and highlights the desirability of hiring salespeople who are both disciplined and adaptive with their time.