Authentic leadership, as a new leadership concept emerging from the demand for honest and\nreliable leaders, has attracted the attention of the business community. The relationship\nbetween authentic leaders and their followers is being investigated across many disciplines.\nThis study focuses on authentic leadership in sales management and explores how it affects\nthe task-related outcomes of salespeople, such as learning orientation, customer orientation,\nintrinsic motivation and working hard. The data for the study were obtained from 364\nsalespeople and analysed using the partial least squares method. The results indicate that\nauthentic leadership has significant positive effects upon learning orientation (�²=0.251;\np<0.01), customer orientation (�²=0.358; p<0.01), intrinsic motivation (�²=0.334; p<0.01), and\nworking hard (�²=0.251; p<0.01). As the theory suggests that authentic leadership makes\nimportant contributions to the development of followers, this study is the first to explore\nthese contributions upon salespeopleâ�Ÿs activities that they undertake within their sales tasks\nand leads to success in personal selling. Findings indicate that authentic leadership has\nsignificant positive effects upon salespeopleâ�Ÿs individual task related outcomes.
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