Title

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

Authors

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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