An investigation of sales managers’ aggressiveness in B2B sales leadership: The sequential mediation model of emotional exhaustion and adaptive selling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of sales managers’ aggressiveness on ethical sales leadership and salesperson performance in B2B context, taking into consideration the sequential mediation of emotional labor and adaptive selling behavior. Sales managers spend most of their time in solving salesforce-related issues, while empirical studies have largely neglected such factors that can have negative consequences on salesforce-related tasks. In order to overcome this gap in the literature, we draw from conservation of resources (COR) theory to introduce and establish an advanced theoretical paradigm. The authors tested the model through 336 responses from B2B salesperson-manager dyads. The findings of the study reveal that sales managers’ aggressiveness has a negative association with ethical sales leadership. Also, sales managers’ aggressiveness is positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively related to salesperson performance. Consequently, we found significant serial mediation of ethical sales leadership and adaptive selling behavior between the relationship of sales managers’ aggressiveness and salesperson performance. In last, manager decisiveness is playing as a significant moderator in the study. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".