Effective Coaching for Adaptive Selling: The Role of Leader-Member Exchange and Gender Matching
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focuses on the role of gender in coaching relationships in the sales context, and extends theory by integrating work on leader-member exchange (LMX) and social role theory (SRT). Specifically, we propose that LMX mediates the relationship between coaching and adaptive selling, but only when the gender of the coach matches that of the employee because men and women enact different role behavior when selling. We test our theory using multiple group moderated mediation in a structural equation model of 564 salespeople and their 69 managers. Results show that, although coaching consistently improves the LMX between managers and employees, it only stimulates adaptive selling when genders match. This study highlights the challenges organizations face when they expect managers to engage in behaviors that are not socially congruent with the expectations of their role. In addition, when the occupation itself is gendered, as is the case in sales, societal norms and beliefs play a large role because coaches may not consider the full variety of strategies that lead to better performance for the opposite gender, and employees of the opposite gender may be less receptive to the coaching. As such, the range of employees who benefit from coaching narrows.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".