Journal article
Transformational leadership effects on salespeople’s attitudes, striving, and performance
Journal of business research, v 110
Mar 2020
Abstract
•A comprehensive model examines Transformational leadership (TL)’s various effects.•TL affects salespeople’s psychological empowerment (PE) and self-efficacy (SE).•Employee vigor mediates the positive TL – PE and TL – SE links.•PE and SE positively affect salespeople’s accomplishment striving (AS).•AS, in turn, positively affects sales performance.
Sales managers face challenges in leading their salespeople. Viewing transformational leadership (TL) as pivotal to gain attitudes necessary for good performance, we present, justify and test a leader behavior (TL) - salesperson's attitudes - salesperson's behavior - performance model. No previous research has done this, with our presented model, investigation, and results providing important contributions to the salesforce leadership literature and managers. An online survey with 313 salespeople in sales positions for 3+ years provided data analyzed using SEM. Results indicate: (1) TL has a direct positive effect on both salespeople's sense of empowerment and self-efficacy and an indirect effect through the mediation of employee vigor; (2) sense of being empowered and self-efficacy positively affect salespeople’s accomplishment striving (AS); and (3) AS, in turn, positively affect performance. The results provide strong support for the importance of how sales managers lead salespeople due to TL's profound effects on salespeople's attitudes.
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Details
- Title
- Transformational leadership effects on salespeople’s attitudes, striving, and performance
- Creators
- Ronnie (Chuang Rang) Gao - School of Business, Trinity Western University, 7600 Glover Road, Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1, CanadaWilliam H. Murphy - University of SaskatchewanRolph E. Anderson - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Journal of business research, v 110
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- [Retired Faculty]
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000527382500017
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85078656081
- Other Identifier
- 991019167765304721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Business