Sales force leadership during strategy implementation: a social network perspective

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.

Engaging a product-focused sales force in solution selling: interplay of individual- and organizational-level conditions

“…First, we take the notion of salesperson heterogeneity as a starting point and apply configurational thinking to demonstrate that a large-scale sales force transformation features equifinal paths to the intended outcome among a heterogeneous sales force. Prior studies have, with a few exceptions, sought to identify universal antecedents that will generally result in intended outcomes when applied across the entire sales force (e.g., Hayati et al 2018;Homburg et al 2010;Hunter and Panagopoulos 2015;Johnson and Sohi 2017). However, as suggested by Ahearne et al (2010) and shown in this study, salespeople differ in their ability to change whereby a universal application of transformation conditions across the salesforce may not be the best approach to achieve complex transformations.…”

“…First, transformations depend on individual salesperson characteristics related to change, such as attitudes, abilities, and behaviors (Ahearne et al 2010;Johnson and Sohi 2017;van der Borgh and Schepers 2018;Wieseke et al 2008). Second, sales management can drive change through its emphasis, leadership styles, information provision, sales tools, organizational resources, or training (Hayati et al 2018;Morgan and Inks 2001;Terho et al 2017;van der Borgh and Schepers 2018;Zablah et al 2012). Third, social influence by experts, peers, leaders, or appointed champions can lead to change (Avlonitis and Panagopoulos 2005;Keränen and Liozu 2020;Wieseke et al 2008Wieseke et al , 2009.…”

“…We also find that prior research offers competing premises regarding the heterogeneity of transformation paths-see Appendix Table 10. Most studies predict uniform transformation paths and seek to identify a clear set of transformation drivers that will lead to desired outcomes (e.g., Hayati et al 2018;Homburg et al 2010;Hunter and Panagopoulos 2015;Johnson and Sohi 2017). Yet some studies highlight that salespeople differ fundamentally in their ability to change and argue that the "successful implementation of planned change interventions largely depends on identifying and appreciating the heterogeneity of individual traits that share meaning with the change" (Ahearne et al 2010, p. 65).…”

“…First, the results advance understanding of effective implementations of sales force-wide planned changes in complex transformation contexts (Ahearne et al 2010;Hartmann et al 2018). Most prior sales force transformation studies seek to detail a clear set of specific, exclusive transformation drivers that lead to the desired outcomes when applied universally to sales forces (e.g., Hayati et al 2018;Homburg et al 2010;Hunter and Panagopoulos 2015;Johnson and Sohi 2017). However, Ahearne et al (2010) suggest that salesperson transformation paths are idiosyncratic, because salespersons differ fundamentally in their ability to change.…”

Emerging Practices in Facebook at National Parks

“…Social networks are conduits of transmission of information in many areas such as municipalities (Bonsón et al, 2015;Bonsón et al, 2012;Park et al, 2016), hospitals (Gittelman et al, 2015;Glover et al, 2015), media (Fernandez Gomez and Diaz-Campo, 2014), tourism marketing (Ketter, 2016;Kiralova and Pavliceka, 2015;Mariani et al, 2016;Martinez-Valerio, 2012), companies and industries (Hayati et al, 2018;Mills and Plangger, 2015;Song et al, 2018;Yuki, 2015), students and teachers (Asterhan and Bouton, 2017;Kondakci et al, 2018;Van Waes et al, 2018), agriculture (Bao et al, 2018), energy (de Paulo and Porto, 2017), archaeology (Mills, 2017) and even academic articles (Haustein et al, 2015;Ringelhan et al, 2015), among other areas.…”