The impact of knowledge and empowerment on working smart and working hard: The moderating role of experience

This research focuses on the impact that salesperson knowledge and empowering leader behaviors have on salesperson working smarter and working harder behaviors. In turn, we examine the impact of working harder and smarter on customer service, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, on sales performance. Moreover, we propose an interactive relationship, whereby the influences of leader empowering behaviors and salespersons' knowledge will be moderated by salespersons' experience. We tested our hypotheses using survey data from a sample of 175 sales people in the pharmaceutical field, along with external ratings of salespersons' knowledge from sales managers, customer ratings of sales satisfaction and service, and archival measures of salespersons' effort and performance. Results indicate that contrary to popular belief, employees with low levels of product/industry experience benefit the most from leader empowering behaviors. Also, we find that employees with lower levels of experience and higher levels of knowledge are more inclined to work harder. We conclude with directions for future research.