دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی رهبری نیروی فروش در زمان اجرای استراتژی: چشم انداز شبکه اجتماعی - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

Many new marketing strategies falter in the execution phase where managers fail to make frontline employees fully committed to implementing the new initiatives. While formal managers can apply transformational and transactional leadership behaviors to increase salespeople’s strategy commitment, peers can also exert a great deal of informal influence on salespeople. Building on recent social network perspectives of leadership, this paper investigates the interplay between the sales manager’s leadership styles and peer effects during the implementation of a new strategy in a large sales organization. The authors find that salespeople with high network centrality but low strategy commitment not only lower their peers’ commitment but also hurt the effectiveness of a transformational manager. Specially, the influence of a central salesperson becomes stronger when the sales group has lower external connectivity. However, sales managers’ transactional leadership can decrease the non-committed central salesperson’s influence over peers.

Discussion

Recent theories of leadership suggest that leaders are not necessarily the occupants of formal managerial positions but could rather be identified by their network centrality. Our results lend credence to this notion about leadership. We find that, during marketing strategy implementation, formal managers are not the only source of influence on salespeople with regard to strategy role commitment. In addition to them, salespeople with high levels of centrality in social networks can significantly influence peers’ strategy commitment. This peer impact is even stronger when the sales group has low external connectivity, denoted by fewer advice-seeking ties with other groups, which makes the group more dependent on the central salesperson. We contrasted the central salesperson’s influence with the sales manager’s leadership styles to provide a better perspective on the significance of informal versus formal leadership effects in sales groups.

Our results indicate that central salespeople with low strategy role commitment not only directly affect peers’ strategy commitment, but also undermine the effect of formal managers’ transformational leadership on salespeople. Transformational leaders often attempt to internally motivate followers by depicting a desired vision and promoting higher-level shared goals. However, these distal goals might be generic and vague and need to be translated into practical guidelines and daily workplace knowhow. Thus, salespeople may refer to trusted sources of advice such as central salespeople to make sense of the transformational manager’s guidelines.