Shaping the Selves of Young Salespeople through Emotion Management

Abstract

This article describes how a door-to-door sales company trains sales people to engage in emotion management. Company managers and salespeople engage in emotion mining, the search for and development of potential emotional capital in salespeople’s biographies. This emotional capital forms an emotional bridge between a salesperson’s current self and the self that is supposed to be developed for the job. The article emphasizes the reflexive relationship between emotion management and the self. Salespeople manage their emotions in an attempt to develop a new, better self, which in turn will be better equipped to do emotion management.