The Indecisive Sales Manager: An Abstract

Abstract

Participative leadership has become the norm where the leader acts as a coach to set clear directions and orchestrates company resources and actively seeks salespeople’s suggestions and ideas in his/her decision-making process. However, this supporting style can become ineffective when the sales manager seeks the collective wisdom of his/her salespeople but is unable to follow through and act on it. This study examines how a manager’s inability to make timely decisions can impair their sales team’s motivation and negatively impact their job performance. The study proposes five hypotheses: H1: Participative leadership is positively related to salesperson’s intrinsic motivation.H2: A salesperson’s intrinsic motivation is positively related to his/her job performance.H3: Participative leadership is positively related to a salesperson’s job performance.H4: A sales manager’s indecisiveness moderates the relationship between the manager’s participative leadership and salesperson’s intrinsic motivation.H5: A sales manager’s indecisiveness moderates the relationship between the manager’s participative leadership style and salesperson’s job performance. With a sample of 255 sales employees from two multinational banks in India, a structural equation model (SEM) was run to test the relationship among participative leadership, indecisiveness, intrinsic motivation and job performance. Gender, tenure and current work experience were used as control variables. Model result fit indices were acceptable. χ2 = 204.42; df = 94; RMSEA = 0.068; CI 90% 0.055–0.074; CFI = 0.92. (McDonald and Ho 2002). The results show that participative leadership is positively related to intrinsic motivation (H1) and intrinsic motivation is positively related to job performance (H2). Additionally, participative leadership directly and positively influences job performance (H3). However, there was no support for moderation of the participative leadership to intrinsic motivation relationship by manager’s indecisiveness (H4). Support was found for the relationship between participative leadership and job performance where job performance was weaker at higher levels of a sales manager’s indecisiveness (H5). It is important for sales managers to be aware of the potential negative impact of decision indecisiveness on their sales team’s job performance particularly when using a participative leadership style.