Weekly Roundup: Stress in Sales People, Learning Quickly or Slowly, How We Remember Words, and How We "Sing" Words

This week’s roundup starts with a topic that is close to my research heart, wellbeing in the workplace but of subgroup that many probably assume are more resilient than other folk in business - sale people. From that I review other research into the brain and learning and language. Read on…

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Emotional Labour in Sales

When we think of sales people we may tend to think of financially driven folk who can take a “no” and are persistent and resilient.

I was therefore surprised to read this recent research by Itani et al. of the University of Mississippi, who conducted a piece of research investigating the mental health of sales people. This is off the back of a 2024 report in the US that reported 70% of sales people are struggling with mental health issues. You, like I, will find that surprisingly high and is in direct contrast to how we may perceive sales people.

They surveyed business to business sales people and found two key drivers of burnout and mental health issues:

• Emotional labour

• Customer injustice

Emotional labour refers to how an individual menages emotions to fulfil the expectations of a job or social role, or needing to pretend to feel differently than how they actually feel. We are probably all familiar with this to a degree and this shows how much emotional strain this can place on individuals particularly those on the front line.

Customer injustice refers to how customers can treat sales people badly and unfairly. Again I am sure most of us are familiar with, and can relate, to this.

These both eat up our emotional resources managing the emotions of the above two requires considerable cognitive and emotional resources. Therefore targeting these two areas will help sales people manage their mental health better. Sales people, remember, are key to business because they are at the proverbial front line. Losing a sales person to burnout or a drop in performance is very expensive to companies.

Therefore helping to manage job demands, promoting authenticity, and helping to manage those difficult customer interactions are all likely to help.

The topic of mental health in the workplace is also close to my heart as this is a core focus of some of the research I have carried out with my research colleagues (Prof. Argang Ghadiri and Prof. Theo Peters). You can take a short free assessment (it’s in beta mode) of your mental health in the workplace based on our SCOAP model here.

So from the surprise of discovering that sales people are not as resilient as many assume to a surprise in the ability of mice to learn - seems like they’ve been fooling researchers for a while now.

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Learning Surprises

I found this particular research fascinating and also humorous. It also explains an apparent paradox in animal learning models. It would be beneficial for animals in the wild to learn quickly but the paradox is that animals in the lab that are researched often require a lot of training - apparently only really “getting it” after hundreds of trials. That seem to make no evolutionary sense.