영업 관리자의 세일즈 리더십 유형이 팀 영업성과에 미치는 영향

Abstract

What is the most effective style of sales leadership in a B2C sales environment? This study was designed to find the answer to this key question. We focused on examining the effects of four leadership styles (paternalistic leadership, transactional leadership, empowering leadership, and issue leadership) of sales managers on team sales performance (subjective team performance and revenue growth rate). Specifically, we analyzed the augmenting effects of each leadership style to examine each style’s discriminatory effect on sales performance at the team level. The data were collected from 130 directly-managed branches of J company which operates B2C distribution business nationwide. In order to control for any potential common method biases, we diversified the sources to three―branch sales managers, sales team members, and objective sales data―and collected the two-wave (T1 and T2) data with the two-month interval, with different measurement points for the independent and dependent variables. Furthermore, we obtained the revenue growth rate data from the company's management database and included it as an objective team performance. The findings of the current study could be summarized into two points. First, the issue leadership style of sales managers was the only style that had the statistically significant augmenting effects on the subjective team performance after controlling for the effects of the other three leadership styles. Second, among four leadership styles of sales managers, the issue leadership style was the only style that had significant augmenting effects on the objective sales performance, i.e., the revenue growth rate. The results verified that the sales manager's issue leadership had a significant augmenting effect on team sales performance (subjective team performance, revenue growth rate). We discussed the implications and limitations of this study and suggested how this study results could lead to future studies.