The Silent Struggle: How Salesperson Loneliness Undermines Performance Through Social Insecurity

Valerie Good, PhD, Amy Greiner Fehl, PhD, and Stephanie M. Mangus, PhD

About half of Americans are lonely, ¹ which the American Psychological Association defines as feeling “discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary.” ² We clarify salesperson loneliness as not merely a lack of interaction at or outside work but rather a demoralizing emotion stemming from a desire for social connection that is perceived to be missing. Understanding loneliness is crucial to a company’s success, particularly since salespeople represent the firm’s primary interaction with customers and a significant source of revenue.

This study focuses on addressing how lonely salespeople behave differently than those not struggling with loneliness and what happens when they are the face of the selling firm. We do this by testing the relationships between key variables in two studies. 

Study Overview

We offer insights into how salespeople’s loneliness and perceptions of their social situation impact their selling behavior and, consequently, sales success. Therefore, we test the concepts of loneliness, rejection, social insecurity, servant leadership, call reluctance, listening, and sweethearting in relation to sales performance. 

Salespeople often face unusually high job stress due to isolation, social insecurity, and performance expectations. High job stress may result in salespeople having both unconscious and intentional behavioral responses to feelings of loneliness, which can be detrimental to their interactions with customers and their selling performance. An understanding of the unfavorable impact of loneliness on relationships between salespeople and customers begins with an awareness of how loneliness impacts salesperson perceptions and behaviors. Since loneliness can create a cycle of negative self-perceptions and behaviors that exacerbate social difficulties,³ we predict that loneliness is associated with social insecurity and is negatively associated with sales performance. We also predict that rejection will intensify the adverse effects of loneliness, resulting in increased feelings of insecurity. 

After building an understanding of the impact of loneliness and social insecurity on performance, sales managers also need insight into why these variables (loneliness, rejection, social insecurity) have such harmful influence on salespeople’s call reluctance and listening. Social insecurity is also an impetus to sweethearting, which is excessively overspending to gain customer approval. We predict that when loneliness increases social insecurity, such insecurity directly impacts how salespeople interact with customers. We then introduce coping strategies into our study. Coping refers to “the use of cognitive and behavioral strategies for dealing with pressures, demands, and emotions in response to distress.”⁴

We offer active coping strategies geared towards loneliness reduction and mitigating passive and damaging coping strategies (i.e., avoidance). Examples of passive coping strategies are sales call reluctance and inactive listening. An active coping strategy—although a damaging strategy—is sweethearting behavior, where a salesperson may conspicuously overspend on customers to win personal acceptance when feeling lonely and socially insecure.⁵ We also hypothesize that servant leadership on the part of sales managers serves as a moderating strategy to mitigate the negative impact of salesperson social insecurity on sweethearting, as salespeople aim to model behaviors that do not violate firm policies and benefit the customer, not just themselves. 

Study One

In Study 1, we examine the impact of salesperson loneliness on social insecurity and objective salesperson performance. We tested this relationship using a mixed-source data set that included an online survey from 151 salespeople. As hypothesized, Study 1 found that loneliness is a key driver of social insecurity, and social insecurity mediates the negative relationship between loneliness and sales performance. That is, lonely salespeople are more likely to hinder their performance. Additionally, rejection reinforces the connection between loneliness and insecurity. 

Study Two

Our second study builds on the important findings from Study 1 and further explores how loneliness leads to behaviors (coping strategies) as mediated through social insecurity. We also examine the impact on salesperson performance, as well as the role of servant leadership from managers. We find that salesperson loneliness has become increasingly prevalent due to our disjointed and technology-dependent society. Increased loneliness is associated with increased social insecurity, ultimately leading to decreased salesperson performance. The behaviors that stem from feelings of loneliness and social insecurity include call reluctance, poor listening to customer needs and priorities, and sweethearting, all of which negatively impact sales performance. These behaviors are off-putting to customers, who then decrease their buying or buy elsewhere entirely, which our results confirm by demonstrating reductions in salesperson performance. 

Real Estate Implications

Real estate managers and salespeople must first recognize the challenges that lonely salespeople face. Managers should actively intervene to create safe spaces that allow employees to reconnect. Helping salespeople feel more socially connected and less lonely can pay dividends to individual performance and the firm’s overall bottom line. Managers can also initiate and maintain ongoing conversations with at-risk salespeople and communicate to the entire team that rejection is about the products and the brand, rather than a personal repudiation of the salesperson. We also recommend training salespeople to become experts in their products, services, and brands and to be less concerned with likeability. These improvements may be crucial in developing salesperson confidence, building appropriate customer relationships, and navigating rejection as a professional rather than on a personal level. 

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Recommended Reading 

Good, Valerie, Amy Greiner Fehl, Stephanie M. Mangus (2024), “Lonely and Insecure: How Salesperson Well-Being Impacts Performance,” Journal of Business Research, 184, 114887. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114887

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References

1. Murthy, Vivek H. (2023), “Surgeon General: We have Become a Lonely Nation. It’s Time to Fix That,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/opinion/loneliness-epidemic-america.html.
2. Modglin, Lindsay (March 13, 2023), “What Is Loneliness? Causes, Effects and Prevention,” Forbes Health, https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/what-is-loneliness/.
3. Baumeister, Roy F. and Mark R. Leary (1995), “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.
4. Gentina, Elodie, L.J. Shrum, and Tina M. Lowrey (2018), “Coping with Loneliness through Materialism: Strategies Matter for Adolescent Development of Unethical Behaviors,” Journal of Business Ethics, 152, 103-122.
5. Good, Valerie, Douglas E. Hughes, and Hao Wang (2022), “More than Money: Establishing the Importance of a Sense of Purpose for Salespeople, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50(2), 272-295.

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About the Authors

Valerie Good, PhD  
Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Arkansas 
Dr. Valerie Good (PhD – Michigan State University) is a well-published researcher with an active pipeline. Her dissertation was distinguished as the top in the field of sales, earning her the American Marketing Association Sales SIG Dissertation Award in 2020. She also received the 2023 Distinguished Early Career Scholar Award from Grand Valley State University and the 2019 Taylor Research Award from Michigan State University in recognition of research excellence. Her research has been published in Harvard Business Review, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and Marketing Letters, with several additional papers currently under advanced review in top-tier marketing journals. She is dedicated to research with practical impact, and her research has been featured in media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Thrive Global, Selling with Noble Purpose, The Conversation, EconoTimes, The National Interest, Broad College of Business News, and the Sales Scholar podcast, as well as additional newspapers and radio stations.

Amy Greiner Fehl, PhD  
Associate Professor of Marketing, NEOMA Business School (France) 
Dr. Amy Fehl (PhD – Oklahoma State University) is a researcher with a strong publication pipeline and a forward-thinking marketing professional. She specializes in developing and interpreting models using mixed methods and rigorous statistical approaches to generate real-world insights for policy and organizational performance. Her research has appeared in several top journals, including the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Affairs, and Advances in Consumer Research, among others.

Stephanie M. Mangus, PhD  
Associate Professor, Baylor University 
Dr. Stephanie Mangus’ (PhD – Louisiana State University) research focuses on buyer-seller dyads in sales and the sales and service interface, including service recovery and the emotions driving salesperson and customer behaviors. Her research has been published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Retailing, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, Industrial Marketing Management, and Psychology & Marketing. She serves on the Editorial Review Boards for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Research, and the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Her work has been presented at conferences by the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science, the Association for Consumer Research, the National Conference for Sales Management, and the Thought Leadership in the Sales Profession Conference. Dr. Mangus’ research and expertise have garnered international media coverage in outlets such as The Huffington Post, the UpNext Podcast, CJAD Radio, WLNS-TV, The Art Newspaper, The Speaker, and KIJK Magazine, among others. She teaches personal selling and sales management for the Center for Professional Selling at Baylor and has received numerous teaching awards at the university and international levels.

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