ORIGINAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH Sales force leadership during strategy implementation: a social network perspective Babak Hayati 1 & Yashar Atefi 2 & Michael Ahearne 3 Received: 10 October 2016 /Accepted: 3 July 2017 # Academy of Marketing Science 2017 Abstract Many new marketing strategies falter in the execu- tion phase where managers fail to make frontline employees fully committed to implementing the new initiatives. While for- mal managers can apply transformational and transactional lead- ership behaviors to increase salespeople’ s strategy commitment, peers can also exert a great deal of informal influence on sales- people. Building on recent social network perspectives of lead- ership, this paper investigates the interplay between the sales manager’ s leadership styles and peer effects during the imple- mentation of a new strategy in a large sales organization. The authors find that salespeople with high network centrality but low strategy commitment not only lower their peers’ commit- ment but also hurt the effectiveness of a transformational man- ager. Specially, the influence of a central salesperson becomes stronger when the sales group has lower external connectivity. However, sales managers’ transactional leadership can decrease the non-committed central salesperson’ s influence over peers. Keywords Strategy implementation in sales . Strategy role commitment . Informal networks in sales force . Transformational and transactional leadership . Social network analysis Marketers need to constantly revise or abolish existing strate- gies and introduce new ones to keep pace with environmental and market changes (Reeves and Deimler 2011). Arguably, however, the real challenge for most marketers lies not in deciding which new direction to take, but in how effectively their organizations will embrace the changes and implement the new strategies (Neilson et al. 2008). Especially in the boundaries of the organizations, successful execution of new strategies almost always demands frontline employees’ com- plete engagement and full commitment. Salespeople play such an integral role in developing and nurturing customer relationships that they can directly influ- ence customer loyalty (Palmatier et al. 2007). On the flip side, however, their critical role allows them to easily hurt strategic initiatives that they are not committed to. For example, un- aligned salespeople can circumvent new pricing strategies and sign suboptimal deals to attain their own quota (Hinterhuber and Liozu 2012), undersell new products (Ahearne et al. 2010b), or withhold customer information from salespeople of other business units during the implementation of a cross- selling strategy (Duclos et al. 2007). Therefore, gaining sales- people’ s strategy commitment is crucial and, at the same time, can be enormously challenging. These challenges highlight the decisive role of leadership in aligning salespeople’ s interests with the new direction and gaining their support throughout the implementation phase. Neil Morgan served as Area Editor for this article. Babak Hayati, Yashar Atefi and Michael Ahearne contributed equally to this work. * Michael Ahearne mahearne@uh.edu Babak Hayati bhayati@aim.edu Yashar Atefi yatefi@lsu.edu 1 Department of Marketing, Asian Institute of Management, Eugenio Lopez Foundation Building, Joseph R. McMicking Campus, 123 Paseo de Roxas, Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines 2 Professional Sales Institute, E. J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, 2117 Business Education Complex, 4005 Nicholson Drive Extension, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA 3 Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute, C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, 334 Melcher Hall, Houston, TX, USA J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. DOI 10.1007/s11747-017-0557-2