At Harbert: Research
Chris Hopkins Jean Howard Lowe Professor Department of Marketing
Reciprocal Loyalty: Success Works Both Ways
G ood research, much like quality data, is a set of facts looking for a story to tell. Individually they may be interesting, but brought together in the right way, they can tell you amazing things. When Chris Hopkins, Jean Howard Lowe Professor in Marketing, took a look at the huge sales staff at United Rental, the largest rental company in the U.S., he saw a trove of facts waiting to be mined, and wondered at the story they may unfold. It was helpful that United Rental is a friend of Auburn University, has hired many of her students, and partnered on a number of projects. So, Chris had a pretty good idea that if he asked the right research question of United Rental, they would avail the trove for him to explore. Chris and his team posited a model called “reciprocal loyalty” which attempts to demonstrate that “employee gratitude amplifies the impact of ethical leadership, which in turn fosters a more meaningful and fulfilling work environment, and that supportive management can foster this employee gratitude thus
enhancing positive employee outcomes and reducing negative ones.” That’s a heckuva research question to try and answer. But Chris and his team
went to work, utilizing the responses of the sales team at United Rental. Leaning into their combined decades of expertise they painstakingly built a research matrix for which wordcount here prevents description, but some of the key posited results were as follows: • Ethical leadership indeed has a positive relationship with work meaningfulness for employees and a negative relationship with job stress. • Good management support for employees seems to have a strong, positive effect on their gratitude toward the company. • Employee gratitude has a positive direct effect on their level of work meaningfulness.
While the study is still in its raw form and will undergo further analysis, Chris feels that, overall it “offers a comprehensive model that bridges the gap between ethical leadership, employee well-being, and sales performance. That ethical leadership is crucial for fostering work meaningfulness and reducing job stress, which ultimately makes salespeople happier and more productive.” The takeaway for companies with sales staffs would seem to be that if management acts with integrity, it fosters trust with sales staff, reduces job stress, enhances work meaningfulness and the end product is better sales numbers. If that’s the story that Chris and his team’s research seems to tell, then companies looking to boost their sales should perhaps give it a good read. HM
10 Harbert Magazine, Spring 2025
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