Anyone who has worked in retail sales knows the feeling: a quota looming at month’s end, a manager checking in with increasing frequency, and a to-do list that seems to grow faster than it shrinks. Sales managers often lean on time pressure as a motivational lever, assuming that urgency translates into effort, and effort translates into revenue. But does cranking up the pressure always produce better results?
A new study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services suggests the relationship is more complicated. The researchers found that moderate levels of time pressure boost sales performance, while excessive pressure drags it down, creating an inverted U-shape. They also identified specific managerial behaviors that can soften the damage when pressure gets too high.
The question behind the research
Valter Afonso Vieira of the State University of Maringá in Brazil and his colleagues wanted to understand a gap in the sales literature. Prior studies had largely treated time pressure as having a straight-line effect on performance: more pressure, more output. But the authors suspected that pressure might work like many other workplace demands, helpful up to a point, then harmful.
They also wanted to look at something that earlier research had mostly ignored: the pressure managers themselves feel, and how that pressure trickles down to their teams. A salesperson doesn’t just respond to their own workload. They also respond to the urgency radiating from their boss. And managers, in turn, can either make things worse by piling on demands or better by offering guidance.
The authors drew on two frameworks to make sense of this. Resource Allocation Theory suggests that when time is scarce, people have to make trade-offs about where to spend their limited attention and energy. Challenge-Hindrance Stressor Theory adds that some stressors (like tight deadlines) can be motivating, while others become paralyzing once they cross a threshold.
How the research was conducted
The team ran two field studies in different retail settings. The first involved 201 salespeople and 65 managers at Brazilian retailers selling furniture and appliances, comparable in scope to firms like Best Buy or Home Depot. Salespeople reported on their own perceived time pressure using a four-item scale, rating statements like “I need more hours in the day to get my work done” and “I never have enough time to think ahead.” Managers filled out a parallel version focused on the urgency they imposed on their teams.
Performance was measured as the percentage of sales quota achieved over the previous twelve months. The researchers also measured manager feedback (whether supervisors regularly commented on work tasks and strategies) and mentoring (hours per week spent coaching the team).
The second study moved into a business-to-business context: a publicly traded Latin American agricultural equipment retailer with annual revenues above $2 billion, selling tractors, harvesters, and field sprayers. This sample included 237 salespeople and 43 managers. Beyond self-reported quota attainment, the researchers pulled objective revenue growth data from company records, comparing 2022 sales to 2021 for each salesperson. They also added a third managerial behavior to examine: the number of meetings a manager held with the sales team during the year, pulled from internal records.
Because salespeople were nested within stores, the team used multilevel statistical modeling to analyze the data, which lets researchers separate individual-level effects from store-level effects.
What the data showed
The first finding held up across both studies and both performance measures: the relationship between a salesperson’s time pressure and their sales results is shaped like an inverted U. Low pressure was associated with mediocre performance, apparently because salespeople lacked urgency and didn’t prioritize high-impact activities. Moderate pressure was the sweet spot, linked to the highest quota attainment and revenue growth. Past a certain point, additional pressure was associated with declining results.
The researchers interpret this pattern as a resource allocation problem. With a moderate sense of urgency, salespeople focus on the tasks most likely to generate revenue, like pursuing high-value customers or closing active deals. Under overwhelming pressure, they get scattered, neglect important activities, and see their performance suffer.
The second finding concerned managerial time pressure. When managers themselves were under low pressure, their salespeople’s performance followed a relatively smooth, mostly linear relationship with their own time pressure. But when managers were under heavy pressure, the inverted U became steeper and more punishing: salespeople hit their peak faster and then fell harder. In other words, a stressed-out manager can amplify the damage that excessive pressure does to a sales team.
What managers can do about it
The third set of findings is where the practical advice lives. The researchers tested whether three specific managerial behaviors, feedback, mentoring, and regular team meetings, could offset the negative effects of high managerial time pressure.
All three showed effects consistent with this buffering role. In Study 1, the combination of high salesperson pressure and high manager pressure produced worse quota achievement on average, but when managers provided consistent feedback or spent meaningful hours mentoring their teams, that negative interaction was softened, and in some configurations, reversed. Study 2 showed a similar pattern for meetings: the formal, recurring gatherings where managers realigned priorities and shared market information helped blunt the damage of excessive urgency.
The authors describe this process as a chain of events. High time pressure forces salespeople to make snap decisions about where to spend their limited time. Without guidance, those decisions tend to be wrong. Feedback helps salespeople identify what isn’t working and redirect their effort. Mentoring builds up skills and confidence that reduce cognitive strain when things get busy. Meetings align the team on what matters most, so individuals aren’t guessing about priorities during crunch time.
Takeaways and caveats
For sales managers and retailers, the authors suggest a few practical considerations. Setting moderate (rather than maximum) time pressure seems to produce the best outcomes. Imposing harsher deadlines from the top can backfire, especially if managers don’t pair that pressure with support. And the support itself appears to matter more than its specific form: feedback, mentoring, and meetings all showed buffering effects.
Several limits are worth noting. The study relies largely on self-reported measures of time pressure, which can introduce bias, though Study 2 used objective revenue data to corroborate the findings. The research is also cross-sectional and correlational, meaning it describes patterns at a single point in time rather than proving that pressure causes performance changes. And both samples came from specific retail contexts in Latin America, furniture and appliances in one case, agricultural equipment in the other, so the authors caution against assuming the patterns hold identically in pharmaceuticals, financial services, or technology sales, where incentive structures and sales cycles look quite different.
Still, the core message of the research is straightforward: pressure in sales behaves more like salt in cooking than fuel in an engine. A little brings out the flavor. Too much ruins the dish. And a good manager, the authors argue, knows how to dial the pressure to the right level while also showing up with the support that makes the pressure productive rather than punishing.
