| Marketers need to constantly revise or abolish existing strategies and introduce new ones to keep pace with environmental and market changes (Reeves and Deimler 2011). Arguably, however, the real challenge for most marketers lies not in deciding which new direction to take, but in how effectively their organizations will embrace the changes and implement the new strategies (Neilson et al. 2008). Especially in the boundaries of the organizations, successful execution of new strategies almost always demands frontline employees’ complete engagement and full commitment. Salespeople play such an integral role in developing and nurturing customer relationships that they can directly influence customer loyalty (Palmatier et al. 2007). On the flip side, however, their critical role allows them to easily hurt strategic initiatives that they are not committed to. For example, unaligned salespeople can circumvent new pricing strategies and sign suboptimal deals to attain their own quota (Hinterhuber and Liozu 2012), undersell new products (Ahearne et al. 2010b), or withhold customer information from salespeople of other business units during the implementation of a crossselling strategy (Duclos et al. 2007). Therefore, gaining salespeople’s strategy commitment is crucial and, at the same time, can be enormously challenging. These challenges highlight the decisive role of leadership in aligning salespeople’s interests with the new direction and gaining their support throughout the implementation phase. To study the role of leaders in a sales context, researchers have predominantly drawn from classic leadership theories (MacKenzie et al. 2001; Schmitz et al. 2014; Shamir et al. 1993; Wieseke et al. 2009; Yukl 2002). A tacit, yet central premise of these theories is a view of leadership as a formal and action-oriented phenomenon confined to managers. However, this top-down conception of leadership is challenged by increasing complexities in sales processes and flatter and more flexible management structures, which all support a more relational and distributed notion about leadership (Flaherty et al. 2012; Mehra et al. 2006). Facing sophisticated customers and complicated sales processes, salespeople need to leverage their relationships with their peers to gain insights on how to handle a situation, push their case faster internally, or overcome administrative or technical obstacles (Plouffe et al. 2016; Schmitz and Ganesan 2014). As a result, salespeople have become so heavily dependent on their internal networks that they can hardly avoid being influenced by key colleagues (Fuller 2014). |