Luxury sales team ambidexterity: a job demands-resources perspective

Luxury sales teams must provide excellent service while still reaching their sales quotas, often under highly demanding conditions. This dual role requirement postulates flexible sales-service related behaviours, which are captured by the construct of sales-service ambidexterity. Scholars have called for research examining the individual and contextual factors that boost effective sales and service-related activities. Drawing from the job demands-resources theory, the present study proposes and tests a moderated mediation model in which: a) job demands (i.e., performance pressure, workload, emotional demands, customer treatment, manager sales versus service expectations) impair luxury sales teams’ capacity to stay ambidextrous, and, indirectly, to achieve their sales and service outcomes; b) job resources (i.e., harmonious passion, emotional labor, teamness, creativity-oriented high-performance work systems, withinteam knowledge sharing, leader affective presence) buffer this negative effect. This model will be tested through a time-lagged, multi-source survey on sales team members and their store managers from luxury stores. Our findings are expected to contribute to the literature sales and service behaviors in the workplace by proposing a new, stress-based perspective on the antecedents and consequences of salesservice ambidexterity. From a practical standpoint, our results are expected to provide new and relevant insights into the strategies needed to optimize the working conditions that facilitate luxury sales team dual sales-services roles in the face of stressful conditions.