How Servant Leadership Leads to Employees' Customer-Oriented Behavior in the Service Industry? A Dual-Mechanism Model

Although servant leadership has been acknowledged as an important predictor of employees' behavioral outcomes in the service industry, there is still no cohesive understanding of the positive association between servant leadership and employees' customer-oriented behavior (COB). This resea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of environmental research and public health 2020-03, Vol.17 (7), p.2296
Main Authors: Yuan, Mengru, Cai, Wenjing, Gao, Xiaopei, Fu, Jingtao
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Cognition & reasoning
Customer services
Customers
Emotions
Employees
Empowerment
Hotels
Hypotheses
Identification
Independent study
Information processing
Leadership
Polls & surveys
Scholars
Servant leadership
Service industries
Studies
System theory
Systems theory
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Summary:Although servant leadership has been acknowledged as an important predictor of employees' behavioral outcomes in the service industry, there is still no cohesive understanding of the positive association between servant leadership and employees' customer-oriented behavior (COB). This research, drawing on cognitive affective processing system theory (CAPS), empirically investigates the influence of servant leadership on employees' COB by exploring two mediators (i.e., organizational identification and vitality). We conducted two studies in China, using a cross-sectional design to survey employees in service-oriented technical organizations (Study 1) and a time-lagged design to survey hospitality employees with frontline service jobs in star-level hotels (Study 2). Across both samples, we found that servant leadership enhanced employees' COB by simultaneously increasing their organizational identification and vitality. We discuss the implications of these results for future research and practice.
ISSN:1660-4601
1661-7827
1660-4601
DOI:10.3390/ijerph17072296