Our research examines the effects of non-financial rewards on sales professional’s psychological well-being—understood as the presence of mental health and the absence of diagnosed mental illness. Building on the Job Demands-Resources and Self-determination theories, we argue that non-financial rewards act as job resources, creating psychological capital that helps buffer the daily job demands’ struggles of people in sales. Using data extracted from 13,564 people working in sales-related roles across 36 countries, we find that non-financial rewards do not uniformly mitigate the effects of job demands on well-being, leading to different moderating effects on mental health versus mental illness. In addition to this, unexpectedly, we find that some non-financial rewards combined with certain job demands can potentially increase the risk of mental illness. These insights are critical for the design of sales well-being preventive and reactive interventions and future sales research adopting the Job Demands-Resources in combination with Self-determination theory.
