An imitation game – supervisors’ influence on customer sweethearting
ISSN: 0887-6045
Article publication date: 10 September 2021
Issue publication date: 19 May 2022
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as the whole editing team, who helped to improve this paper significantly.
Citation
Ertz, E., Becker, L., Büttgen, M. and Izogo, E.E. (2022), "An imitation game – supervisors’ influence on customer sweethearting", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 432-444. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-08-2020-0369
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited