Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

11-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Department

Organizational Leadership

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Dr. Richard Dool

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Dr. Joe Cardot

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Dr. Ian Shepherd

Abstract

Sales supervisors can tremendously influence the sales teams they manage, and their behaviors can influence a team’s engagement and sales performance. Because of the supervisor’s influential role, their behavior, positive or negative, can ripple throughout the organization. As a result, a supervisor who role models abusive behavior within their organization also promotes a climate of abuse and incivility that can contribute to a toxic workplace. Abusive supervision (AS) is a significant problem in many business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations that negatively impacts the financial welfare and subjective well-being of organizations and their employees. This quantitative correlational study aimed to examine how an abusive supervision climate (ASC) impacts B2B sales performance and understand the roles of psychological safety and leader–members interdependence. The data were collected through social media service LinkedIn and audience panel services MTurk and Centiment. A sample of 319 responses was used to analyze the relationships of a moderated mediation model. The analysis results supported the moderated mediation model, with leader–members interdependence as the moderator and team psychological safety as the mediator. The moderated mediation model explained approximately 40% of the variance between the conditional indirect effect of ASC and outcome sales performance (OSP). The results also showed that ASC had a positive direct relationship with OSP and a significant negative conditional indirect effect on team psychological safety, depending on the level of leader–members interdependence. The results of this study may help companies understand the broader implications of an abusive supervision climate. Organizations may choose to prioritize interventions and implement policies to reduce the frequency within their B2B sales organizations, thereby fostering higher levels of psychological safety and building high-performing teams.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.