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In their boundary‐spanning role, marketing managers are often charged with managing cross‐functional teams and collaborative work groups. Although this interfunctional coordination is key to organizational performance many marketing managers run into resistance owing to leadership styles and stereotypes held about other functional departments. The aim of this paper is to understand the leadership qualities important to the marketing function and compare them to those found important in other business functions.

Data were collected from two multinational organizations. Over 1,000 employees from six functional departments (engineering, information technology, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and research and development rated the importance of 45 leadership attributes to high‐performing leadership in their particular business function.

A total of nine dimensions of leadership are uncovered and four of them are deemed more important in marketing compared to some of the other business functions. The four dimensions are charisma, vision, creative, and challenges the process.

Future work might consider examining the perceptions of leadership in a business‐to‐consumer company compared with that of a business‐to‐business company. It might be interesting to look at the strategy of an organization and then determine how the perceptions of leadership might compare to the current findings.

Marketing managers charged with leading cross‐functional teams might consider the aspects of leadership that resonate with different functional areas, A supportive and visionary leader is equally important to all of the functional areas but employees might respond differently to a leader exuding charisma or challenging the traditional ways of doing things.

This paper serves as a first step in understanding marketing leadership and could also serve as a stepping stone to our understanding of what makes marketing managers successful leaders. The information identified here can help marketing managers fulfill their boundary spanning roles and manage their cross‐functional teams more effectively.

The literature discusses the relationship between marketing practice and leadership style and suggests that these are dynamic and linked. Providing empirical data, this paper seeks to investigate this relationship between marketing practices and leadership styles.

A model was developed and tested using a survey methodology based on two well‐validated research instruments, one from the Contemporary Marketing Practices research group and the other the MLQ leadership questionnaire. Data were analyzed using a Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach.

The results showed that a transformational style of leadership is positively associated with interaction and network marketing. Transactional leadership is positively associated with database and network marketing. Passive/avoidant leadership has no effect on any of the marketing practices.

The research is unique and exploratory, and was conducted in a UK context. The use of moderators within the model would have been preferable. For these reasons, generalizability is somewhat constrained.

The research adds weight to the argument that leadership styles need to be consciously adapted with respect to marketing practices. There are also implications for managerial training and development needs.

To one's knowledge very few studies have considered the relationship between marketing practices and leadership styles. The paper, therefore, reports work in an area not previously researched empirically.

Marketing channels exist in an increasingly competitive international and global environment. Consequently, many firms have reengineered their marketing channels systems by placing greater emphasis on fostering higher levels of cooperation among international channel participants. However, there are relatively few studies that explore cross‐cultural issues in marketing channels. Thus, investigating whether cultural differences influence how channel participants react to a firm’s channel strategies is an important issue that needs to be addressed. This study comparatively examines channel leadership styles, cooperation, and channel member performance across three divergent national cultures. More specifically, the study seeks to assess whether employing uniform channel strategies produces similar responses from channel members in different countries. Using data drawn from a sample of automobile dealerships in the USA, Finland, and Poland, inconsistent results were found, which suggest that using leadership stylesto foster cooperation among channel members across different national cultures on a standardized basis is not an appropriate channel strategy. Based on the findings, international channel management implications, limitations, and directions for future research are proferred.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the linkages between leadership, organisational trust, and marketing effectiveness, in service businesses within three service categories (health care, hotel, and resort) in Vietnam.

The research utilizes ANOVAs and structural equation model.

The findings revealed that transactional leadership is associated with calculus‐based trust. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, cultivates knowledge‐based trust and identity‐based trust, which in turn positively influence marketing effectiveness. A direct relationship between transformational leadership and marketing effectiveness is also examined.

The research offers insight into the role that leadership and trust play in determining marketing effectiveness in service businesses in Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to knowledge by examining what happens to marketing in a time of toxic leadership, embodied in a corporate psychopath, in response to a call for marketers to seek a broader understanding of how marketing operates within organisations.

Commentators have suggested that concepts outside the usual marketing domain may aid in the gaining of an intra-organisational understanding of how marketing operates. Here, the concept of corporate psychopathy was used to identify a psychopathic UK board director and chief executive officer (CEO) via a constructivist approach to research involving six in-depth interviews. A CEO and a main board director who were measurably psychopathic were studied via these reports.

The paper examines how corporate psychopaths, as archetypal toxic leaders, are detrimental to marketing. Overseeing the marketing function within the UK part of an established and well-branded multi-national services company, corporate psychopaths capriciously dismantled the marketing initiatives that were in place and needlessly abandoned future marketing plans. Marketing services, marketing ethics, product quality and corporate reputation declined. Good marketers left.

The research demonstrates the dangers to marketing of toxic leadership. The paper also suggests that marketing may be uniquely qualified to deal with toxic leaders because it can, through research, identify them through their effects and behaviour. The results illustrate the value of longitudinal qualitative market research in investigating complex organisational situations.

The paper makes a unique contribution to the marketing field by empirically investigating, for the first time, the influence of a corporate psychopath director and a psychopathic CEO on the marketing function and practice. The research was conducted longitudinally using qualitative market research techniques via in-depth interviews over a two-year period. Longitudinal research aids in establishing causality, and this was evident in this research, as the negative influence of psychopathic leadership was monitored over time.

The manufacturer depends on channel members for the performance of marketing functions. Therefore, the channel participants need to co‐operate with one another while simultaneously pursuing independent as well as systemic goals. Examines how co‐operation among distribution channel members can be fostered through the use of participative, supportive and directive leadership styles foster channel member co‐operation and assesses the relationship between co‐operation and channel member performance. Develops a conceptual model and empirically tests the linkages among the variables on data drawn from a survey of key informants in a sample of automobile dealerships. Shows that participative, supportive and directive leadership styles are directly related to channel member co‐operation, which, in turn, is positively associated with channel member performance.

This study aims to offer and validate an integrated marketing capability-product innovations framework. Particularly, it aims to examine the role of adaptive marketing capability in enabling market ambidexterity and incremental as well as radical product innovation. Also it intends to investigate the moderating role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Manufacturing firms in Pakistan, an emerging economy, are taken as the context for this study. A designed survey questionnaire is used for data collection. Partial least square technique is employed to empirically validate and test the hypothesized model with a sample of 192 manufacturing firms. Particularly, the two-stage approach in SmartPLS is used to validate measurement models, and structural equation modeling technique is used to test the proposed hypothesis.

The findings not only confirm that adaptive marketing capability is instrumental to both incremental and radical product innovations but also reveal that adaptive marketing capability serves an important antecedent to market ambidexterity shedding new lights on its mediating role in the relationship of adaptive marketing capability with incremental and radical product innovations. Moreover, the results find that the effectiveness of adaptive marketing capability to support market ambidexterity may involve a possible trade-off between exploitation and exploration when the leaders exhibit a low or high level of transformational leadership behavior.

This study contributes to outside-in strategic perspective and contextual ambidexterity literature by revealing the role of adaptive marketing capability as an important enabler of market ambidexterity which, in turn, allows the firm to simultaneously introduce incremental and radical product innovations. In this way, this study advances the current understanding of the antecedents and consequences of contextual ambidexterity. Also, this study provides insight into the types of capabilities needed for the firm's contextual and employees' behavioral adaptation to simultaneously manage exploitation and exploration within the same business unit which was lacking in the previous literature. Further, this study also offers a novel understanding of the conditional role of transformational leadership between adaptive marketing capability and market ambidexterity.

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important realm of entrepreneurship during the last decade. Research on what motivates social entrepreneurial activity continues to be of interest in the field. Given the integral role of the social entrepreneur, one area identified as deserving more attention is the leadership traits of the social entrepreneur. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a conceptual model on the role of national leadership culture on social entrepreneurship.

As part of the social fabric of a country, national leadership culture is viewed as a social contextual factor that can either enhance or hinder social entrepreneurial activity. As its broader conceptual base, this paper relies on institutional theory, marketing systems and leadership theory. At the heart of the proposed conceptual model are six leadership dimensions from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) theoretical model: charismatic/value-based, team-oriented, participative, self-protective, humane-oriented and autonomous. These leadership dimensions are central to the propositions that accompany the proposed conceptual model.

Implications of this research for entrepreneurial marketing and public policy are presented. Since this research is conjectural, future directions for empirical research on national leadership culture in social entrepreneurship are discussed.

The conceptual model is the first to examine the role of national leadership culture on social entrepreneurship. The research adds value to the growing body of research on social entrepreneurship in its social context. It answers the call in the literature to examine leadership as it pertains to the individual entrepreneur’s pre-disposition to engage in social entrepreneurial activity.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a shared leadership governance arrangement facilitates improved outcomes within a social marketing service eco-system. The research was focussed on gaining an understanding of participants involved in a cross-institutional partnership. The case study selected to facilitate this exploration was a social marketing project that aimed to support aboriginal households in Victoria with regard to their energy efficiency. It thus investigated the meso-level insights experienced by partners and those delivering the service.

Interview (yarn-based) data from 20 individuals involved in an energy efficiency programme were collected and analysed. Participants shared their experiences via informal “yarns” that were conducted in the first 12 months of the programme. This timing was chosen to gain their initial self-reflective perspectives and their interactions within the shared leadership model.

The results of the analysis identified six key themes that are interrelated and fundamental to building trust between all actors involved. The themes include relationship building, advocating rights, managing competing priorities, being community driven, using communication that translates and using community networks. Four of the themes were found to be components of relationship and trust building, which collectively lead to effectively accessing aboriginal communities. These findings extend current knowledge on the structures necessary to ensure healthy eco-systems are sustained throughout social marketing programmes.

The authors established that shared leadership is well aligned with service-dominant logic, and the findings of this study reveal that it can positively contribute to meso-level service eco-systems and thus improve social outcomes for recipients of social marketing efforts. The findings also underscore the need for social marketers to recognise the importance of having a culturally acceptable value co-creation model in social marketing programmes when working with Aboriginal Australians.

This paper is the first to explore and develop the authors’ understanding of the efficacy of adopting a shared leadership approach in social marketing. Shared leadership has the potential to be an institutional arrangement that facilitates service-dominant logic and the value co-creation process, influencing positive behaviour change at the micro level in aboriginal communities. Specifically, it is the first to identify that “advocating rights” is an important component for partners to adopt in cross-cultural collaborations when collectively running social marketing programmes.

This paper investigates internal and external barriers influencing the different dimensions of firm service innovativeness and the moderating effect of transformational leadership on these relationships in an emerging economy, namely, Turkey.

The hypotheses were tested using cross-sectional survey data from 148 hotels. The authors use regressions to analyze the data set.

The results demonstrate that barriers to innovation need not necessarily impede firm service innovativeness at all times; some of these so-called “barriers” may even act as catalysts that improve firm’s likelihood of adopting innovations. More importantly, the findings suggest that a transformational leadership style alleviates the negative influence of internal barriers on internal service innovativeness dimensions of process, strategic and behavioral innovativeness.

The positive effect of transformational leadership lessening the detrimental impact of barriers to innovation is a topic in need of research. In addition to examining this phenomenon in a developing country, the authors choose a service retailing industry as a study context: hospitality/tourism. The main reason for choosing this industry is that there is little empirical evidence of service innovation activity in this industry despite the fact that it contributes to a large extent to employment and gross domestic product in most emerging economies, and it is, in fact, a fairly innovative industry. Furthermore, this study presents a unique perspective by investigating small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).