Personal selling has a central feature in common with leadership: both are forms of interpersonal influence. In the seller-buyer situation, a salesperson attempts to change and influence the perceptions, cognitions, decisions, and behaviors of a customer. In the leader-follower situation, a manager tries to achieve exactly the same with an employee (Bass 1997). Building on this parallel, we assume that the tone of an interpersonal relationship in a manager-employee dyad spills over into the employee-customer dyad one level below, ultimately affecting customer-level variables. This reasoning is in line with the premise of "linkage research" (Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger 1997; Wiley 1996), which examines the translation of inner-organizational realities into realities on the part of customers. In this thinking, front-line employees' "sandwich position" between internal and external stakeholders is used as a basis for the hypothesis that what they experience at the workplace (such as leadership and organizational climate; e.g., Liao and Chuang 2007; Schneider et al. 2005) translates into the experiences they provide for customers. Building on this stream of research, the current study is the first to investigate how different leadership styles of sales managers translate into customer outcomes through their impact on corresponding selling approaches of salespersons. In doing so, we refer to the duality of transformational and transactional leadership (Bass 1985) on the one hand, and the duality of relational and transactional selling (Weitz and Bradford 1999) on the other hand.
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