Sales force leadership during strategy implementation: a social network perspective

Babak Hayati (), Yashar Atefi () and Michael Ahearne ()
Additional contact information
Babak Hayati: Asian Institute of Management
Yashar Atefi: Louisiana State University
Michael Ahearne: University of Houston

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2018, vol. 46, issue 4, No 3, 612-631

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Strategy implementation in sales; Strategy role commitment; Informal networks in sales force; Transformational and transactional leadership; Social network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11747-017-0557-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joamsc:v:46:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s11747-017-0557-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... gement/journal/11747

DOI: 10.1007/s11747-017-0557-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science is currently edited by John Hulland, Anne Hoekman and Mark Houston

More articles in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().