Instrumental leadership as a determinant of salesperson performance: applying the extended full range leadership theory (FRLT)

Abstract

Salesperson performance plays an important role in determining the success of an organization. Due to of rapidly changing technology, increasing competition and rising customer expectation, the job of a salesperson continues to remain challenging. Consequently, these changes impose a substantial responsibility on sales managers to choose their leadership styles so as to effectively lead their teams towards goal achievement. The choice of leadership styles which match the salesperson‘s needs and expectations is further complicated by the existence of many styles. Ad-ditionally, the limited effectiveness of any one style, in a variety of situations, has been explicat-ed by the Contingency Theory (Bryman, 1992). This challenge for the leader has drawn the at-tention of several researchers, who have tried to explain the relationship between leadership styles of sales managers and salesperson performance using multiple leadership theories. One of the theories that has received considerable theoretical and empirical support is the Full Range Leadership Theory (FRLT) proposed by Avolio and Bass (1991). It comprises of three typologies of leadership behavior: (1) Transformational, (2) Transactional, and (3) Laissez-faire. Antonakis and House (2002) extended the existing FRLT by adding the ―instrumental leadership‖ dimension which represents the ‗strategic leadership‘ and ‗follower work-facilitation‘ behavior of a leader. Based on the extended FRLT, this study examines the impact of sales manager leadership style on salesperson performance as well as the mediating role played by trust, role ambiguity and salesperson effort in the process. A non-probabilistic sampling procedure, i.e. convenience sampling, was adopted. A total of 500 responses were collected, with 250 responses each from salesperson of pharmaceutical and fi-nancial services sector respectively. The extension and application of instrumental leadership into the existing FRLT model and then testing of the same with respect to the above mentioned mediators and outcome variable has been achieved through the following analyses: (1) testing of factor structures of extended FRLT, (2) testing of multiple models of the extended FRLT vis-à-vis mediators: trust, role ambiguity and salesperson effort; and outcome variable: salesperson performance, using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The study finds that ―instrumental leadership‖ is able to explain unique variance in salesperson performance, when analyzed alongside the existing FRLT components, supporting its addition to the existing FRLT. Additionally, the findings show that the relationships of instrumental leader-ship differ from the relationships of other leadership styles vis-à-vis mediators: trust, role ambi-guity and salesperson effort, further supporting its claim to be a distinct and valuable component in the FRLT. The present body of work is the first study which tests the extended FRLT in the sales leadership context. It answers the call made in previous studies and articles asking for a comprehensive test-ing and evaluation of ―instrumental leadership‖ (Antonakis, 2013; Antonakis & House, 2002). The study provides an additional testing of mediators which gives new insight into the manner in which these leadership theories function. The study contributes towards existing leadership and sales force management literature by ex-plaining and empirically examining the relationship between various leadership behaviors and their impact on salesperson performance. The findings of the study can help sales managers un-derstand the relationships between different leadership styles and salesperson performance.