Autonomic Feedback in Stressful Environments: How Do Individual Differences in Autonomic Feedback Relate to Burnout, Job Performance, and Job Attitudes in Salespeople?

Individual differences in autonomic feedback—the dispositional tendency to experience signs and symptoms of autonomic nervous system activity in response to positive and negative emotionally evocative stimuli—were hypothesized to relate to affective and behavioral job outcomes in occupations characterized by job stress because higher autonomic feedback would intensify reactions to emotional evocation. In a cross-sectional study of Dutch salespeople, individual differences in autonomic feedback were independent of role stress and yet were strongly and positively related to burnout and negatively related to extra-role performance and job satisfaction; they were also nonsignificantly and negatively related to in-role job performance. Further, when job stress was higher—high role stress or low managerial support—individual differences in autonomic feedback were more strongly related to burnout, especially emotional exhaustion.