Most insurers use agents to market their products and services. Thus, agents have a major role in the financial success of an insurer. A key concern of insurance sales supervisors should be how to engender favorable attitudes and effective performance from their agents. This paper reports the results of an investigation that focused on the relationship between sales supervisor and agent attitudes and performance. Implications for practitioners and researchers are provided. Marketing insurance products and services involves several key decisions. Included among these decisions are identifying target markets, developing marketing objectives, defining constraints, and allocating marketing resources [32]. A major issue concerning allocation of marketing resources is whether the insurer will use insurance agents or some other means to market its offerings. Although some insurers employ direct mail, print, or broadcast advertising to market their products and services, agents tend to be the driving marketing force for most companies. Because agents have a major impact on an insurer's financial success, a paramount concern of insurance sales supervisors (or managers) should be how to obtain positive (favorable) attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction) and effective performance from their agents. Some previously published research has examined this issue. Researchers have explored topics such as the relationship between agent performance and motivation [34, 38, 53], [53], and job characteristics [53]; between agent effectiveness and product knowledge and training [3]; between agent work motivation and organizational climate [51, 53, 54] and role stress [52]; *Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Missouri. **Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Minnesota. ***Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Kentucky. ****Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Texas. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sat, 18 Jun 2016 07:20:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Impact of Sales Supervisor Leadership Behavior 133 between role stress and agent attitudes and behaviors [15]; between supervisory, task-related, and person-related factors and agent attitudes and behaviors [17]; between agent retention and training and compensation policies [55]; as well as potential conflict between agents and home office personnel [28]. Notwithstanding the previous research, minimal empirical work [53] has focused on the relationship between a sales supervisor's leadership behavior [45] and agent attitudes and performance. The linkages between and agent attitudes and performance should be of concern to insurance sales supervisors because prior investigations (in non-insurance sales occupations) have found that a supervisor's may affect subordinates' attitudes and performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of sales supervisor on agent role conflict, role ambiguity, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and performance, as well as interrelationships among these variables as proposed by Walker, Churchill, and Ford [57] in their model of salesperson performance. These variables were selected for investigation because of their demonstrated importance in previous empirical work and potential importance to insurance sales supervisors. Background Literature