Authentic leadership in sales management: the effects on salespeople's task related outcomes

Abstract

Authentic leadership, as a new leadership concept emerging from the demand for honest and reliable leaders, has attracted the attention of the business community. The relationship between authentic leaders and their followers is being investigated across many disciplines. This study focuses on authentic leadership in sales management and explores how it affects the task-related outcomes of salespeople, such as learning orientation, customer orientation, intrinsic motivation and working hard. The data for the study were obtained from 364 salespeople and analysed using the partial least squares method. The results indicate that authentic leadership has significant positive effects upon learning orientation (β=0.251; p<0.01), customer orientation (β=0.358; p<0.01), intrinsic motivation (β=0.334; p<0.01), and working hard (β=0.251; p<0.01). As the theory suggests that authentic leadership makes important contributions to the development of followers, this study is the first to explore these contributions upon salespeople‟s activities that they undertake within their sales tasks and leads to success in personal selling. Findings indicate that authentic leadership has significant positive effects upon salespeople‟s individual task related outcomes.