Examining Impacts of Technostress on the Professional Salesperson's Performance

This paper explores technostress in the context of the professional sales area. This area is unique in that sales professionals prefer to spend time with customers in developing interpersonal relationships, rather than on technology related tasks. At the same time, the modern sales environment requires the use of IS such as sales force automation applications. The sales role also offers increased possibility of role stress and very high expectations for technology-enabled performance, making this an ideal context to explore how technostress operates through role stress in negatively impacting technology-enabled performance. It also means that finding ways to mitigate this negative impact is of strategic importance, and a review of the sales technology literature points to self-efficacy as a potential factor to reduce the effects of technostress. Integrating literature from technostress, sales and social cognitive theory, we explore the relationships between technostress, role stress, technology self-efficacy and technology-enabled performance among business-to-business salespeople. Our findings show a positive association between technostress and role stress, and a negative one between role stress and performance. We find that technology self-efficacy can counter the decrease in performance and increase in role stress due to technostress. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.