AFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND LEADERSHIP STYLE: A STUDY WITH SELLERS

Companies from various continents show a growing interest in identifying and developing the skills of their supervisors. These organizations have this initiative in order to promote the construction of collaborative relationships in the teams, in order to create constructive and motivating environments for their subordinates, so that they can be committed to the organization. The development of dynamic teams depends on leadership and commitment between leader and followers, which brings efficiency to the organization, with subordinates willing to take risks to achieve the goals. Leadership can affect the behavior of an organization's employees in terms of attitudes, motivation and performance, all of which can affect levels of commitment. Taking into account that the competitive environment in which companies are inserted, they lead to the understanding that employees are their most important assets, commitment and leadership are being identified as the main resources of high performance organizations. The objective of this study was to compare the degree of affective organizational commitment of the salespeople with the leadership style and the performance perceived by the leaders. A quantitative and nomothetic approach of relational scope was adopted, with a cross-sectional survey using the SPSS® software to calculate ANOVA in the Affective Organizational Commitment (ECOA), Multifactorial Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) scales and performance measured as a result of leadership . The findings indicate that although there is a positive relationship between the leadership style and the salesperson's affective commitment, as well as between the leadership style and the performance of the leaders perceived by the salespeople, there is no mediation between ECOA and MLQ. No relationship was found between the salesperson's emotional commitment and the perceived performance of the leaders. Several significant differences were found between the degree of commitment of the salespeople and the leadership style and effectiveness of the leader, the non-association between the affective commitment of the seller and the performance of the leader suggests that there are other mediators that deserve to be investigated in the future. This is because if salespeople perceive themselves as emotionally committed, and that this commitment is also associated with performance, other indicators in the area of people management can benefit, such as, well-being at work, organizational climate and interpersonal relationships.