The Role of Trust in Salesperson—Sales Manager Relationships

By Karen Flaherty, James M. Pappas. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2000

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LMX) offers a way to better understand nuances of the salesperson-sales manager relationship. The study reported here employs leader-member exchange theory to evaluate how sales employees develop trust with their managers. Findings show that salespeople's perceptions of procedural justice positively influence salespeople's commitment to the organization, and thereby their satisfaction with the job. Suggestions are provided concerning how sales organizations can train managers to manage consistently and thereby build trust and commitment in salespeople.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding Social Loafing: The Role of Justice Perceptions and Exchange Relationships (2003, background): “Flaherty and Pappas (2000) studied sales employees in car dealerships, and did not find a relationship between distributive justice and trust in leaders.”
Motivating factors: perceptions of justice and their relationship with managerial and organizational trust (2005, background): “As managerial trust involves a specific person, it is likely to be most strongly predicted by the justice type that is most directly under the control of the individual (Flaherty & Pappas, 2000).”
A correlation of servant leadership, leader trust, and organizational trust (2005, background): “Trust theory has established that leader behavior plays a significant role in the development of trust in the leader (Bennis, 2002; Courtney, 1998; DePree, 2002; Dirks and Ferrin, 2002; Flaherty and Pappas, 2000; Gimbel, 2001; Konovsky and Pugh, 1994; Mayer et al., 1995; Podsakoff et al., 1996; Spar”
The Relationship between Interpersonal Trust, Employee Satisfaction, and Employee Loyalty (2006, background): “Flaherty & Pappas (2000) study the salesperson–manager relationship and report that trust has a strong impact on job satisfaction.”
Sales-Force Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility: Attributions, Outcomes, and the Mediating Role of Organizational Trust (2010, result): “…it investigates an unrecognized antecedent of organizational trust, namely sales force reactions to CSR. Importantly, in contrast to the existing sales research, we investigate salesperson trust reactions at an organizational rather than at a sales manager level (e.g., Flaherty & Pappas, 2000).”
The role of trust in employee‐manager relationship (2008, methodology): “Measurement To remain consistent with previous research, all the measures pertaining to trust were taken from Flaherty and Pappas’s (2000). All the measures pertaining to job satisfaction were taken from Hartline and Ferrell’s (1996) and all the measures pertaining to dedication were taken from Test”
Does TQM influence employees' job satisfaction? An empirical case analysis (2007, result): “The results are consistent with previous research which found that employees with high reciprocal trust had better opinions of their managers and experienced higher satisfaction, involvement, well-being and commitment (Flatherty and Pappas, 2000; Noorliza and Zainal, 2000; Gilbert and Tang, 1998; Co”
Effects of Ethical Climate and Supervisory Trust on Salesperson’S Job Attitudes and Intentions to Quit (2006, background): “Sales researchers have shown that trusting one’s supervisor makes employees feel safer, engage in productive behaviors, and increases job satisfaction (e.g., Brashear et al. 2003; Flaherty and Pappas 2000).”
Models of Interpersonal Trust Development: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Evidence, and Future Directions (2006, background): “Trust has emerged as a prominent construct in research predicting individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors, organizational commitment, turnover, and job performance (Deluga, 1995; Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Flaherty & Pappas, 2000; Robinson, 1996).”