Expectancy Effects and Leadership: Sales Team Performance Report

This report examines the application of expectancy effects within a sales team, focusing on how a leader's altered behavior towards team members can significantly impact their attitudes and performance. The author, a sales team leader, initially adopts a directive leadership style but shifts towards empowering team members by providing autonomy and expressing confidence in their abilities. The report details a practical experiment involving a low-performing employee, where the leader's change in behavior—from providing direct instructions to offering support and encouragement—results in noticeable improvements. These improvements include increased transparency, more frequent communication, and a shift in the employee's attitude and willingness to seek assistance. The findings highlight the positive correlation between a leader's trust and the team's performance, emphasizing that when individuals feel valued and trusted, they become more proactive and committed to achieving their goals. The report concludes by outlining the leader's intention to continue using expectancy effects to foster a more open, autonomous, and motivated team environment, ultimately aiming to enhance both individual leadership skills and overall business results.

This paper has been elaborated on the expectancy effects, especially
the “Change behaviours”. It has shed light on how change in behaviour
towards an individual can change his attitudes and way of behaving towards
the very person. This topic has been chosen as it is one of the most aligned
topics to my PDP output where I am mainly focusing on considering the view-
points and opinions of others. Being part of a sales team, my role is to be
accountable to achieving specific targeted annual quotas. It becomes very
hard when I am not only answerable and responsible for my target but for
the full team. As a person, I have been in the field where I have a track
record of achievements. This has directed me towards leading the team to
follow my path in conducting their activities with their clients. By doing so, it
feels like dictating my team about doing the things they feel right. This also
has an impact on the team’s autonomy.
The hypothesis of the paper is when giving my team members enough
space and motivation for executing their styles and knowledge in order to
perform their given task; they will be performing better than before. This will
be highly beneficial for the entire team and the company both as the same
time.
We have conducted weekly team meeting to go through each
individual’s forecast. During our meeting we discuss about the opportunities,
targets, challenges and closing date. I help the team in meeting their
challenging by motivating them and by giving them examples from my own
experience. For this experiment I will be focusing on my low performer

employee, I will behave as I always do in the first meeting and note her
response and subsequent behaviour during the week.
I have aligned with my peer to attend the first meeting as an observer.
The meeting went as usual discussing the deals, challenges and actions on
how to move forward. During the meeting the high performer objected some
of my advices and we discussed them through out the meeting hours and
agreed on the actions. My low performer employee is as usual very quiet in
the meeting and took the directions as directed to him.
The rest of the week was normal- discussing about the targets and
guiding the employees, and receiving emails or calls (unplanned
interactions). Usually, my low performer employee avoids face to face
interaction and only updates me through sending mails bout the actions I
have been suggested to her.
At the time of our weekly meeting, I asked the team members to share
the closing dates and opportunity size and if there are any changes they
noticed as compared to the last week. Finally, I stated that, “I believe in your
ability and knowledge. I do know that you know your clients better than me. I
also believe that you all can overcome all your challenges in your own way
towards success. Do remember that there is no better way to learn than
learning from your mistakes and feel free to reach out to me whenever you
need my support. Wishing you all a very successful week”. The team was a
bit concerned at the beginning till I left the meeting room. 10 minutes later,

my low performer employee approached my desk to seek my advice. I
responded to her by saying that “Nothing can be fixed right now but you
should remember that though you did not succeed this time, you will surely
do in the next if you learn from your present mistakes and situations. Hence,
this is not a complete loss”. I also told her to do it the way she believes is
right because I believe that she has the required skills to make a difference.
I noticed in the rest of the week that the team is opening up and I saw
greater number of face to face interactions and calls from my employees and
less emails than before. For the low performer employee, I started looking for
her and asking about how things are moving and at the first couple of
interactions she was cautious about sharing what she was doing and I kept
telling her “I am here always to guide you. So, never hesitate to approach
me for my help”. Within few days she started opening up and she was very
happy to share her successes and the lessons she learnt and how she do it
differently.
Through changing my behaviour from the first meeting to the second
meeting and the interactions in between, my observer peer and I noticed a
notable improvement in two areas. Firstly is in the attitude and behaviour of
the low performing employee. She became very active and started opening
up to many channels to seek support. Secondly, the transparency was
increased. I keep receiving updates calls instead of getting updates once in
our weekly meeting.

The change in my behaviours and attitudes towards my team
members made them realise that I am very confident about their skills and
ability. Also, my attitude made them learn that this is a safe environment to
make mistakes. Mistakes can be fixed but the thing is to learn from our
mistakes. On the other hand, they also wanted to prove to me back that they
are accountable and credible. Moreover, when people find that the other
person trusts them and their abilities, they become more assertive,
conscious and wilfully stand for their promises. This automatically
encourages them in improving their performance.
This experiment was quite hard for me, as earlier i used to advice them
to follow my path. I never gave them such a big space to prove their skills
and ability. Therefore, I was always worried about failure. I used to think that
what will happen if we fail in delivering our Sales commitment. So it was
difficult for me to give the team more space to do things their way. Anyhow, I
managed to try this experiment to change my behaviour, as i considered it
to be very important and hence, witness the change in the performance and
results. While doing the experiment I felt that my team and I had a better
chemistry where the team also started to talk to me about their personal
challenges and interests. More importantly, they began to tell me what I
wanted to know without me having to ask them.
I have decided to select the expectancy effect to boost the
performance of all the team members and to be an effective leader. As I
result of the experiment I expect the team to develop in three areas. Firstly,

being very open and feel free to seek support. The second is to improve the
autonomy of the team and thirdly, to create a sense of motivation among
them. All the three areas I believe will personally help me in developing my
leadership skills and professionally it will help me in driving greater results to
the business.