A qualitative study of leader behaviors perceived to enable salesperson performance

Abstract

This study builds on and extends previous sales leadership research by exploring sales professionals’ perceptions of effective leadership behaviors. Semistructured interviews with both sales leaders and salespeople working in a global enterprise software company were examined through a qualitative analysis. Results indicated that participants believed sales leadership played an important role in influencing sales performance. When asked to describe specific sales leader behaviors that best enable salesperson performance, sales professionals – both sales leaders and salespeople – overwhelmingly referenced coaching, followed by collaborating, championing, and customer engaging. We define and describe these four key sales leader behaviors and identify four potential mediating variables (trust, confidence, optimism, and resilience), from which emerges a conceptual framework of sales leader behaviors perceived to enable salesperson performance. We examine these four key sales leader behaviors and mediators in the broader context of leadership theory, particularly transformational, servant, authentic, and adaptive leadership theories. The key contribution of this study is the identification of a set of leader behaviors that are likely to be especially effective in modern sales organizations given that they originated from the perceptions of sales professionals themselves.     

Mobilization of Cognitive Resources and the Generation Effect

The generation effect refers to the memory advantage of words that have been generated rather than read. Such a read-generate comparison confounds qualitative task differences and raises methodological problems. A revised methodology is proposed circumventing these problems in that the encoding task is held constant and all stimuli have to be generated, but the degree of generativeness (i.e. the amount of cueing) is varied. In Experiment 1, 1, the (refined version of the) generation effect is demonstrated in a within-subjects design; with increasing generation activity left to the subject, free recall performance increases. No effect is obtained for degree of target masking. The same finding is replicated and shown to be independent of self-paced study time when generative activity is manipulated between subjects (Experiment 2) or within subjects (Experiment 3). As all learning trials involve generation, encoding time is controlled statistically, and free recall is used as a measure of memory, this refined generation effect cannot be explained as an artifact of selective attention or elaboration. Rather, generative activity seems to increase the mobilization of cognitive resources. This motivational account is supported by Experiment 4 showing an enhanced generation effect for positive mood.     

Two studies of Piaget's theory of moral judgment

The relationship between conservation skills and subjective responsibility (SR) in moral judgment was examined in two studies. The Kohlberg ontogenetic priority hypothesis stating that conversation is a necessary but not sufficient condition of SR was pitted against the common structural basis hypothesis advanced by Damon. Piaget's notion of heteronomy as a combination of preoperational thought and unilateral respect was studied by using the behavioural independence tasks by Subbotsky as indicators of unilateral respect. A teaching experiment using Galperin's and Obukhova's method to induce conservation indicated significant transfer from conservation to SR. SR was found to be more susceptible to regression over a 3–month period than conservation. Conservers were less likely to regress on SR than nonconservers. Unilateral respect was related to objective responsibility but not to conservation. Taken together the data fail to support Kohlberg's ontogenetic priority hypothesis and only partially support the Piaget and Damon model of a common underlying structure. It is concluded that SR judgments largely reflect individual judgmental strategies and the effect of conservation on SR is intepreted in terms of increasing cross-situational consistency in the use of these strategies.     

The dependence of the conjunction fallacy on subtle linguistic factors

Summary The three experiments reported in this article are concerned with moderating conditions of the so-called conjunction fallacy. Although the conjunction of two events (A&B) is necessarily less probable than one event alone, intelligent people's judgments sometimes violate this logical principle when it is easier to think about or imagine the conjunction A&B than the component event A. It was hypothesized that the fallacy might be reduced either by a priming treatment (directing the participants' attention to the logical rule prior to the conjunctions tasks) or by a linguistic manipulation (replacing the ambiguous term probability by the term frequency. Experiment 1 shows that the bias is drastically reduced by the subtle linguistic manipulation and suggests that the fallacy is partly due to a common misunderstanding of the probability concept. The lack of a priming effect seems to imply that cueing or activation of logical schemata is not a critical factor. Experiment 2 replicates the linguistic influence under slightly modified task conditions, and Experiment 3 corroborates the ineffectiveness of the priming factor using a stronger priming treatment.     

A positivity bias in person memory

Two experiments demonstrate a positivity bias in person memory. Recall is superior for statements endorsed by a target person than for denied statements. This effect of informational positivity is independent of affective positivity (Experiment 1) and on holds for statements associated with one individual as an organizing category (Experiment 2).     

What kind of mood influences what kind of memory: The role of arousal and information structure

Mood-congruent memory was investigated as a function of the structure of the information to be remembered (categorical vs. isolated) and the participant’s arousal (stimulating drug vs. placebo). Free recall of photographs showing either pleasant or unpleasant scenes was assessed for subjects under positive or neutral mood states, induced by the imagination of emotional experiences under relaxation. Although the arousal manipulation did not affect the recall performance, the findings highlight the importance of the information structure: a mood-congruency effect was obtained for the isolated pictures; however, the effect did not appear for categorical material, suggesting that structural constraints on the recall process can override the influence of mood on memory. Interestingly, the subject’s evaluations of the pictures also shifted toward their mood states. A general recall advantage of positive mood was observed.     

Pupillary responses to syntactic ambiguity of sentences

Pupillary responses have proven to be reliable physiological correlates of cognitive effort in a variety of tasks, including language processing. To investigate the relation between psychological and syntactic complexity 20 syntactically ambiguous sentences, balanced for bias, were presented to 16 subjects, while their pupil size was continuously measured. These sentences could be read as verb oriented (syntactically more complex) or object oriented (syntactically less complex). Principal components analysis of pupillary movements revealed that verb-oriented readings, resulted in greater pupillary dilations than object-oriented readings, indicating that syntactically more complex sentences, as determined via a formal grammar, require greater cognitive effort in processing. This is viewed as further evidence for the notion that syntactic and psychological complexity are related. High- and low-bias sentences did not induce comparable differences in pupillary movements, indicating that the "multiple meaning theory" may have to be modified.     

Context-dependent alarm responses in wild vervet monkeys

Animal Cognition - The alarm calls of nonhuman primates are occasionally cited as functionally equivalent to lexical word meaning in human language. Recently, however, it has become increasingly...     

Mediating interpersonal expectancies via vocal cues: Differential speech intensity as a means of social influence

Differential vocal emphasis in the tape-recorded instruction reading for a standard person perception task was manipulated by mechanically raising or lowering the volume of the key words describing the success or failure response alternatives on the rating scale. In a series of three experiments, Ss exposed to success emphasis in the instructions rated the stimulus persons as more successful than did Ss exposed to failure emphasis. This trend was reversed for Ss who listened twice to the instructions. None of the Ss reported awareness of the influence attempt.