Impact on Salespersons' Success Through Transformational Leadership

The paper analyses how strongly the combination of transactional and transformational leadership improves the performance of German salespersons in comparison to a straight transactional leadership style. Most sales executives use a straight transactional leadership style to manage their sales force. Although the impact of sales forces' success through transactional leadership has been researched very well, recent research has only very limited analyzed the impact of the combination of both leadership styles exclusively on the success of salespersons in Germany. This paper will provide the current state of knowledge concerning transformational leadership in sales and its impact on followers' performance. Additionally, different samples of sales executives and sales agents have been interviewed about the applied leadership style and their opinion about the performance of their sales force. The questionnaire includes questions from the MLQ-Form 5X to identify the leadership style and questions about the sales executives' and sales agents' individual opinion about the success of their team. The results of the quantitative research are discussed in corroboration with the findings from the literature. The results of this paper show that the application of a transformational leadership style in sales has a positive effect on the success of salespersons. According to the results of the interviewed sales executives and agents the application of transformational leadership techniques has an even greater effect on the performance of salespersons than what is commonly observed in studies without a specific focus on sales. In some cases the effect that we measured was quite massive.