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Goal Consensus, Subordinates’ Prior Performances, and Supervisors’ Resource Allocation Preferences

between the regional manager and the branch manager affects the regional manager’s
resource allocation preferences. However, the fact that a few branch managers transferred
from one branch to another during our sample period may have confounded our main
11
results.
To alleviate this concern, we create an indicator variable representing changes
in branch managers (CHANGE) during the sample period and include this variable in
regression models (3) and (4) to control for the impact of changes in branch managers.

Table 10 reports the regression results for hypothesis 1. The results are similar once we
control for the potential confounding effects.

5. Conclusion and Limitations

In this study, we examine whether the goal consensus between regional and branch
managers, and branch managers’ prior performance affect regional manager resource
allocation preferences for branch offices. Furthermore, we investigate whether a branch

office’s past performance affects the relation between goal consensus and the regional
manager’s resource allocation preferences. The empirical results indicate that the higher
the level of goal consensus between regional and branch office managers, the more
advertising funding is distributed to the branch office after controlling for the impact
of branch office characteristics. We also find that the better the branch manager’s prior

performance, the more senior sales agents are allocated to the branch office. However,
we do not observe a moderating effect of branch offices’ prior performance on the
relationship between goal consensus and the tendency to receive a more unexpected
portion of resources. Overall, our results suggest that regional managers’ resource

allocation preferences vary with the level of goal consensus and with subordinates’ prior
performance.

11 Due to its own concerns, the case company distributes the survey and remains anonymity among
its managers. Therefore, we cannot identify which branch managers answered our survey but later
transferred to new branch offices during our sample period. We are provided information on which
branch office the branch manager belonged to at the time he/she did the survey, non-confidential
information (e.g., branch manager’s age and tenure), and whether the branch office has changed
branch managers.

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