Addressing concerns with salesperson competitive psychological climate, sales performance, and turnover intention: The role of threat and learning orientation

Salesperson perceptions of competitive psychological climate (CPC) has been the focus of research that has revealed both positive (sales performance) and negative (turnover intention) main effects. This finding is counterintuitive, as in non-sales settings research has shown that increased perceptions of competition among co-workers leads to increased turnover intentions and reduced performance. Thus, we investigate what mechanism may explain this prior finding, and potentially show a less effective side of CPC in sales. Our research is based on cognitive appraisal theory and a sample that includes survey responses of 219 salespeople, paired with objective sales performance outcomes. We find that, indeed, when tested in the same model, a salesperson's increased perception of CPC improves sales performance, but also drives greater turnover intention. Further investigation uncovers that when CPC increases salesperson threat appraisal the mediating effect results in a negative impact on sales performance and an increase of the magnitude of turnover intentions. As a buffer, we find that learning orientation moderates the impact of the CPC to threat appraisal relationship. Our findings offer new insights on CPC in sales, thus identifying drawbacks of managerial actions that may drive salesperson CPC assessments.