Abstract
In the context of economic stagnation and recession, retailers face fierce competition and experience enormous pressure to increase their sales. In this study, we focus on the potential costs of higher store sales for retail workers by examining its effect on work engagement. Drawing on work intensification literature and the job demand-resources model, we study how job variety and workload, two job characteristics, mediate the relationship between store sales and engagement. Store revenue data and survey data of 525 sales employees, embedded in 110 stores of a large Dutch retail organization were used, to perform mixed models analyses. The analyses demonstrate that store sales is negatively related to job variety and positively related to workload. In turn, job variety positively affects work engagement, while workload negatively affects work engagement. Based on multi-source, multilevel data it is thus shown that there are negative effects of store sales in retail. More insight is created into the job characteristics that explain the negative link between store sales and engagement. As it is empirically demonstrated that there are indeed costs associated with improved performance in retail, it is crucial that organizations ensure investments in maintaining resourceful work environments.
Highlights
The economic stagnation and recession of European retail markets of the last decade (CBS, 2014) has intensified competition between retailers
One should note that the correlations of store sales are biased upward because they are not corrected for the smaller sample size at the second level of analysis
This study focuses on examining the potential costs of increasing store sales for sales employees
Summary
The economic stagnation and recession of European retail markets of the last decade (CBS, 2014) has intensified competition between retailers. Studies suggest that management interventions aimed at increasing sales have far-reaching consequences for employee’s well-being and attitudes (Godard, 2001, 2004; Van de Voorde et al, 2012). A topic that has gained limited attention in this regard so far is work engagement, which has been defined as a positive, fulfilling emotional state of work-related well-being (Schaufeli et al, 2002). It is frequently measured and studied by work and organizational psychologists as it has shown to relate to lower turnover, higher customer loyalty (Harter et al, 2002), and higher in- and extra-role performance (Christian et al, 2011). Two competing theories circulate in the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org van der Laken et al
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