Reducing Salesperson Turnover Intentions via Organizational Market Orientation and Selective Hiring: A Job Demand-Resources Approach

This study is designed to respond to repeated calls for research on sales person retentionby building upon a mature research stream to identify ways to reduce turnover in boundary spanning employees and the resultant effect it has on organizational productivity. Specifically, this research draws on the Job Demands-Resources model to explore the effect of employee perceptions of firm market orientation as a way to reduce role stressors and subsequently turnover intentions. It also looks at employee traits that may serve as a buffer to the role stress to turnover intentions link and can be part of the hiring selection process (in this case grit). In so doing, this research uses a sample of early career salespeople to examine the effects of a firm's market orientation (MO) and selective hiring for specific traits (level of grit) on a salesperson's intention to quit using Job Demand-Resources as a framework. The authors utilized a questionnaire to collect data from a sample consisting of 260 respondents who were employed full-time and worked in either B2B or B2C sales as boundary-spanning employees. The measures utilized in this study have been used in previous research and have demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity. Analysis of the latent constructs was conducted using PLS-SEM. The model was assessed as specified in the hypotheses and was estimated using the PLS algorithm to obtain path coefficient estimates. Findings suggest that organizations can benefit internally from strong MO by mitigating stressors placed on boundary-spanning employees. Those who perceived strong MO in their employer experienced more clearly defined roles, which led to decreased role ambiguity. These increased levels of job satisfaction, which reduced turnover intention. Additionally, Grit appears to only moderate the link between role conflict and job satisfaction, which suggests that grit can serve as an additional resource salespeople can tap into in response to the demands of role stressors thereby reducing their likelihood of leaving their positions. In this research, inclusion of market orientation as an antecedent to role stressors in the Job Demands-Resources model expands the conceptualization of the construct as it relates to salespeople in that market orientation is something the firm can control directly. This opens research opportunities to use this model in the sales literature. In addition, the job-demands-resources model expands the role of grit beyond positi