The Costs of Store Sales for Retail Workers

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Paul van der Laken¹  Susanne Beijer²  Sanne Nijs³  Marc van Veldhoven³  Jaap Paauwe³ 

[1] Vereniging Achmea;Department of Management and Organization, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam;Department of Human Resource Studies, Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University

关键词: work engagement;    job characteristics;    multilevel analysis;    retail;    store sales;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.536970

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY