Building on decades of research on the proactivity of individual performers, this study integrates research on goal setting and trust in leadership to examine manager proactivity and business unit sales performance in one of the largest sales organizations in the United States. Results of a moderated-mediation model suggest that proactive senior managers establish more challenging goals for their business units (N = 50), which in turn are associated with higher sales performance. We further found that employees' trust in the manager is a critical contingency variable that facilitates the relationship between challenging sales goals and subsequent sales performance. This research contributes to growing literatures on trust in leadership and proactivity by studying their joint effects at a district-unit level of analysis while identifying district managers' tendency to set challenging goals as a process variable that helps translate their proactivity into the collective performance of their units.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 34. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 January 2026.
All research outputs
#1,415,599
of 30,073,058 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Applied Psychology
#463
of 3,599 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#10,347
of 310,208 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Applied Psychology
#10
of 47 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 30,073,058 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 95th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,599 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 21.6. This one has done well, scoring higher than 87% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 310,208 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 47 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its contemporaries.
