A Field-Based Study Pertaining to the Relationship of Sales Call Anxiety, Emotional Intelligence, and Employee Engagement in Sales Professionals

Sales call anxiety is a type of communication anxiety reflecting the fear that sales professionals harbor in being adversely judged and rejected by clients. Although sales call anxiety elicits a variety of complex symptoms, all of the manifestations seem to be in direct conflict with the facilitation of a successful sales engagement and debilitating to the sales professional and their ability to remain fully engaged. An abundance of recent research has presented an association between general social anxiety disorders and emotional intelligence. This study is the first to examine domain specific sales anxiety in relationship to emotional intelligence and employee engagement. Real estate brokers and agents from a Midwest regional real estate firm ( n = 121) were surveyed. Sales call anxiety correlated negatively with emotional intelligence and with employee engagement. It was also found that emotional intelligence does not directly mediate or moderate the symptoms of sales call anxiety. This study suggests that the psychological symptoms, physiological symptoms, and protective behaviors of sales call anxiety have a more profound impact on one's ability to facilitate emotions than the other three sub-scales of emotional intelligence.