Salespeople represent a primary source of competitive intelligence (CI), but the contextual factors that influence the performance impact of salesperson CI quality remain underresearched. The authors develop a framework to examine the performance impact of CI quality at the individual salesperson and sales district levels, with sales district CI quality diversity and sales managers' network centrality as contingencies thereof. The empirical results from multilevel data sets of two U.S.-based corporations reveal that district CI quality diversity weakens the positive performance effect of CI quality at both levels. Sales managers' centrality in within-district and peer advice networks buffers the performance losses created by district CI quality diversity, but salespeople's centrality does not have this buffering effect. The study uncovers conditions under which the positive performance impact of salesperson and district CI quality can disappear and even become negative, thus highlighting the role of managers as CI hubs.
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.
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