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Customer sweethearting is a common illicit behavior of frontline employees in service firms. This paper aims to examine the impact of supportive–disloyal leadership behavior on customer sweethearting at different levels of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality.

Drawing on imitation theory and need-to-belong theory, the paper builds a conceptual model and empirically tests it using data from a survey-based study and a complementary experiment.

The authors find that employees’ customer sweethearting is affected by their supervisors’ supportive–disloyal behavior (employee sweethearting) through two divergent paths: employees imitate the sweethearting behavior of their supervisors; and employee sweethearting triggers employees’ feelings of belongingness to their organization, which reduces their customer sweethearting behavior.

The findings suggest that service firms can mitigate customer sweethearting by raising awareness that supervisors act as negative role models to subordinates and fostering high-quality LMX relationships, which give employees a sense of belonging to the supervisor and the organization.

By taking supervisors’ supportive–disloyal leadership behavior as an ambivalent driver of customer sweethearting into account, this paper provides further insight into the occurrence of customer sweethearting, particularly its underlying contrasting psychological mechanisms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, besides the health concerns, caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis that has particularly hit service industries hard. Due to extensive safety measures, many service employees have to work remotely to keep service businesses running. With limited literature on leadership and virtual work in the service context, this paper aims to report on leadership effectiveness regarding employees' work performance in virtual settings brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on the input–process–outcome (IPO) framework, this research investigates the effectiveness of leadership on service employees' work performance mediated by work-related tension, autonomy, and group cohesiveness. Furthermore, this study explores moderating effects of the service provider's digital maturity. To test the derived model, the authors collected survey data from 206 service employees who, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, unexpectedly had to transform to a virtual work environment. The authors analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results indicated that it took task- and relation-oriented leadership behavior to maintain service employees' work performance in a virtual environment during crisis situations. Further, results indicated mediating effects of service employees' individual job autonomy and team cohesiveness; surprisingly, work-related tension did not impact employees' work performance. Results offered service businesses guidance on how to effectively lead in times of crisis when service employees predominantly work in virtual environments.

This is the first empirical study to show how leadership affects service employees' work performance in a virtual work environment during crisis times. Thus, the study contributes to the scarce literature on the impact of leadership in service firms that have to operate in such a setting.

Frontline service employees (FSEs) face high demands of emotional labor when dealing with difficult, and sometimes even uncivil, customer behavior while attempting to deliver service with a smile. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior. The authors investigate two potential processes – ego threat and perceived interactional justice – and further address boundary conditions of this effect.

The data for this paper were collected in three studies: one field experiment and two online experiments using adult samples. Hypotheses were tested and data was analyzed using ANOVA and regression-based modeling approaches.

Findings from a field-experimental study and online experiments show that FSEs offer lower service levels to uncivil customers. The authors further find that this effect is mediated by a perceived ego threat and that employees’ regulation of emotion (ROE), as part of their emotional intelligence, attenuates the effect of perceived ego threats on service levels.

This study finds that perceived ego threat (but not perceived interactional justice) explains why employees respond negatively to uncivil customer behavior. Therefore, it offers an emotion-driven explanation of retaliatory behavior in frontline service contexts. Implications for theories focusing on service value co-destruction and customer incivility are discussed.

The findings from this research show that ROE attenuates the impact of perceived ego threat on employee retaliatory behavior. Managerial implications include developing and training employees on emotion regulation. Furthermore, managers should identify alternative ways for restoring an employee’s ego after the employee experiences uncivil customer behavior.

The authors propose and test two processes that can explain why employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior to gain a deeper understanding of which processes, or a combination of the two, drive employee responses. Furthermore, the authors shed insights into boundary conditions and explore when employees are less likely to react to uncivil customer behavior while experiencing ego threat.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of individual customer characteristics on frontline employees’ (FLEs) customer need knowledge (CNK), a construct that objectively measures FLEs’ ability to accurately identify a given customer’s hierarchy of needs.

The study uses hierarchical data involving the customer and bank advisor levels in the banking sector of three European countries. The matched sample consisted of 1,166 customers and 332 employees. To account for the nested structure of the data, the study used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) using HLM software.

The results show that customers’ financial experience and risk aversion positively influence CNK and customer-perceived responsibility for the service outcome negatively impacts CNK. The results further show the impact of individual customer cultural values on CNK, which can be influenced by customer-oriented employee training. Cross-level interaction effects indicate that training measures can reverse negative influences of customers’ high power distance and uncertainty avoidance on CNK, whereas for customers characterized by high long-term orientations, training measures can backfire.

This study contributes to research on the antecedents of FLEs’ CNK by examining the currently overlooked influence of individual customer characteristics that are pertinent to the employee–customer interaction process. The study reveals customer characteristics as a new area of antecedents influencing FLEs’ accurate perceptions of customer needs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether both perceived sustainable organizational and supervisor support, which represent a sustainable human resource management (HRM) approach, can induce commitment to the employer brand.

This study includes a diverse sample of 3,016 employees drawn from various German organizations. To test the developed hypotheses, a structural model that included all the hypothesized effects was built, using Mplus 7.

Perceived sustainable supervisor support (PSSS) has a direct effect on brand commitment, whereas perceived sustainable organizational support (PSOS) only generates brand commitment indirectly, mediated by brand prestige, brand distinctiveness, and brand trust. The findings further underline that, compared with PSOS, PSSS has a stronger impact on trust in respect of the employer brand.

By considering current employees and their commitment to the employer brand, this study takes an insider view and sheds new light on how an employer brand based on sustainable HRM can achieve commitment, as well as how several mediators affect this link.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between digital transformation and excess employees. This research investigates the questions of when human−machine synergy can be achieved after a firm goes through digital transformation and whether there will be excess employees in the interim.

This paper takes A-share listed companies as research object in the period of 2011−2020 and a total of 24,718 samples are obtained. Hypothesis testing and regression analysis are performed in STATA.

This paper finds a human−machine mismatch in the short term, as evidenced by an increase in the rate of excess employees; however, with the progress of digital transformation, it can drive the achievement of human−machine synergy in the long term, and management efficiency plays a mediating role in this process. Further research showed that the effects of digital transformation on the number of employees, revenue generation per capita and profit generation per capita varied in both the short and long term. In addition, the characteristics of the company affect the relationship between digital transformation and excess employees.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the impacts of digital transformation on the human capital structure of companies at a micro level. It also provides insights into how to improve human capital demand structure through digitalization, thus providing insights into labor market changes.

The proliferation of studies on leadership competencies have not yet provided a consistent set to guide the work of researchers and practitioners. This paper aims to generate a clear, literature-based overview of the relevant leadership competencies for the twenty-first century.

The paper is an integrative literature review and identifies four strands of literature on leadership, reaching back to traditional works. It reviews each strand to establish which leadership competencies remain relevant for the twenty-first century.

This paper shows it is essential to clarify and harmonize terminology used in leadership literature. It identifies 18 groups of leadership competencies required for the twenty-first century. The research reveals that leaders of the twenty-first century must be able to combine a strong concern for people, customer experience, digitalization, financialization and the general good.

This paper is based on a non-exhaustive list of literature derived from studies published in Western journals, written in English. Future research should include papers beyond the confines of Western academia and entail fieldwork to test the comprehensive framework derived here.

This paper will help practitioners develop leadership training curricula and transform the leadership culture in their organizations. The competency list can be useful in recruitment and selection processes for leadership positions. Professionals will find it helpful as an index in self-diagnosis and personal development for their career decision choices.

The paper addresses the growing need for clarity on the required leadership competencies for the twenty-first century.