Impact of Supportive Leadership on Perceived Sales Team Cohesion: Mediation of Critical Thinking and Moderation of Empowerment

Abstract

This paper investigates antecedent and mediators of salespersons' perceived team cohesion. It posits that supportive leadership significantly predicts perceived team cohesion through proactive and enabling behaviour of leaders for critical thinking and empowerment. Data from 542 salespersons belonging to 70 sales teams are gathered. The factor analysis resulted into four-factors and the confirmatory factor analysis confirms the four-factor model. Hypotheses testing and mediation analysis is done using process script for SPSS. The paper finds significant positive direct effect of supportive leadership on salespersons' perceived team cohesion. Mediation analyses reveal partial mediation effect of critical thinking between supportive leadership and perceived team cohesion, and no mediation effect of empowerment is found between supportive leadership and perceived team cohesion. The findings of this paper broaden the understanding of the role of supportive leadership in salespersons' perceived team cohesion and explain the process by which leaders can build high cohesion among followers.