Making Things Happen Through Challenging Goals: Leader Proactivity, Trust, and Business-Unit Performance

    Authors

    C. D. Crossley; C. D. Cooper;T. S. Wernsing

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    J. Appl. Psychol.

    Keywords

    proactive behavior; trust; leadership; goals; performance; JOB-PERFORMANCE; TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP; SELF-EFFICACY; SINGLE-ITEM; WORK TEAMS; BEHAVIOR; PERSONALITY; MODEL; ANTECEDENTS; ORGANIZATIONS; Psychology, Applied; Management

    Abstract

    Building on decades of research on the proactivity of individual performers, this study integrates research on goal setting and trust in leadership to examine manager proactivity and business unit sales performance in one of the largest sales organizations in the United States. Results of a moderated-mediation model suggest that proactive senior managers establish more challenging goals for their business units (N = 50), which in turn are associated with higher sales performance. We further found that employees' trust in the manager is a critical contingency variable that facilitates the relationship between challenging sales goals and subsequent sales performance. This research contributes to growing literatures on trust in leadership and proactivity by studying their joint effects at a district-unit level of analysis while identifying district managers' tendency to set challenging goals as a process variable that helps translate their proactivity into the collective performance of their units.

    Journal Title

    Journal of Applied Psychology

    Volume

    98

    Issue/Number

    3

    Publication Date

    1-1-2013

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    540

    Last Page

    549

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000318693400010

    ISSN

    0021-9010

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