Antecedents and Outcomes of Salesperson Polychronicity in B2B Industries in Malaysia

Purpose: An approach for organisations to maintain a competitive advantage is to better understand the roles of present and future salespeople. Polychronicity or multitasking makes us more distractible and prone to errors. However, the ability to multitask is a valuable skill in many industries, as it increases productivity and saves time. This paper proposes that multitasking compromises performance on how salespeople in Malaysia can be influenced by their manager's ambidextrous leadership, their resistance to change, how it affects the service outcomes of service recovery performance, customer-directed OCB, and manager trust in salesperson. Design/methodology/approach: Salespersons were chosen randomly from a certain pool of companies Out of 190 salespeople from various sales organisations, 171 accepted the request to participate after being approached through their superiors using google form. Findings: Result shown that when sales leaders exhibit behaviors associated with openness and encouragement, salespeople tend to demonstrate higher levels of polychronicity, and have positive relationship with services recovery performance and customer-directed OCB and the manager trust in salesperson increase. However, findings show salesperson behaviors react differently when their manager exert control and less interested in the well-being of their subordinates can hinder polychronic behavior also there is no significate relationship between salesperson behaviours and their resistance to change. Originality/value: This study aims to examine the correlation between a salesperson's polychronicity in B2B Industries in Malaysia only.