Managing (Sales)People towards Performance: HR Strategy, Leadership & Teamwork Defended on Thursday, 11 June 2009

Managing people towards performance is one of the most critical priorities for managers in practice. This dissertation focuses on this important issue and explores how HR Strategy, Leaders, and Teams, impact performance. It addresses respectively how HR as a system of coherent attributes, multiple dimensions of transformational leadership, and team reflexivity can enhance the performance of (sales)people in organizations. Based on a series of field-studies, the present dissertation demonstrates a number of novel insights. First, it reveals that internal coherence of HR strategy has a positive effect on organizational performance. Second, it demonstrates that both a leader’s level of transformational leadership, as well as a team’s level of reflexivity can be functional, but also dysfunctional for job performance of people in organizations. These results are important for managers, as they represent evidence-based insights, some of which are counter-intuitive, on how they can effectively manage people towards performance. For researchers, the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the HR-performance relationship.

Keywords

strategic hr, complementarity, transformational leadership, team reflexivity, goal orientations, adaptiveness, role ambiguity, performance, salespeople