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.
