Leadership behavior, satisfaction, and the balanced scorecard approach : An empirical investigation of the manager‐employee relationship at retail institutions in Taiwan

Purpose – A literature review has revealed that a sales manager's transformational leadership has a positive impact on the job satisfaction of salespeople, while job satisfaction has significant influence on salespeople's work behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the transformational leadership of sales managers and the job satisfaction of salespeople. Design/methodology/approach – The research was designed as a quantitative study, and the population was identified as salespeople in the consumer product industry in Taiwan, resulting in 123 individual surveys for analysis. Findings – The findings supported the hypothesis that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between sales managers' transformational leadership and sales associates' job satisfaction. The result identified the predictors of sales managers' transformational leadership on the sales associates' job satisfaction through regression analysis. Originality/value – The balanced scorecard (BSC) was originally intended to solve problems related to the historical nature of financial measures in accounting approaches. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to this literature by focusing on a major issue that has been less investigated, namely, the linking of the BSC perspective to the empirical investigation of leadership behaviors using statistical and technical tools and to predict employee satisfaction. The paper suggests applying Kaplan and Norton's BSC, which includes the perspectives of financial, customer, internal business, and innovation and learning measures to consider the effects of leadership behaviors on employee job satisfaction.