Abstract
Social anxiety affects salespeople. Yet little is known about its association with salesperson performance and the resources that might alleviate its presumably negative impact. Drawing from work on social and clinical psychology, this study investigates how personal (i.e., mindful acceptance) and social (i.e., perceived sales manager support) interventions can serve as safeguarding mechanisms that salespeople can leverage to reduce social anxiety and its impact. The findings, derived from a dataset consisting of survey data collected from 135 business-to-business salespeople matched with objective sales performance data, show that social anxiety is negatively associated with sales performance. The results also show that higher levels of mindful acceptance and perceived sales manager support are associated with lower social anxiety and alleviate the negative relationship between social anxiety and sales performance. The findings and implications are examined through in-depth interviews with fifteen sales professionals. Implications of this research are also discussed.
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