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In today’s retail environment, retailers’ leadership skills can make the difference between the success and failure of their retail stores. Despite the acknowledgment that retailers’ leadership skills and behaviour are important, treatment of the topic within the retail marketing and management literatures is still very limited. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to focus on the relationship between the retailers’ charismatic leadership and frontline employee outcomes.

For the purpose of this study, the authors develop hypotheses about the influence of the retailers’ charismatic leadership on frontline employee job satisfaction, self-efficacy, organizational identification and turnover intentions. Using structural equation modelling, hypotheses are tested using a sample of 208 frontline employees from the Finnish retail industry.

As a first main contribution, the findings of this study indicate that charismatic leadership has a very strong positive impact on job satisfaction. As a second contribution, this study shows that there is strong positive link between charismatic leadership and the self-efficacy of frontline employees. As a third contribution, this study indicates that charismatic leadership is positively related to organizational identification. And finally, this study indicates that charismatic leadership has a very strong negative impact on employee turnover intentions.

This study contributes to retail management and services marketing literature by broadening the current understanding of the leadership behaviour of retailers and its effectiveness and demonstrating how frontline employees respond to charismatic leadership in the retail setting.

Fashion retail employees sometimes “bend the rules” to help their customers. Referred to as customer-oriented deviance, this study responds to calls to examine the motivational antecedents of this behavior. This research also tests the moderating effect of tenure on the relationships between a frontline employee's motivations, their customer-oriented deviance behaviors and commitment to the organization.

Data were collected via a self-completed, anonymous, online survey provided to a sample of 390 sales associates employed in retail fashion businesses.

Findings demonstrate that fashion retail employees were inclined to adapt service procedures and engage in deviant communication about either their organization and/or the products they sell for both pro-social and self-directed reasons. Interestingly, long-tenured employees demonstrated consistently lower motivations to engage in consumer-oriented deviance compared to short-tenured employees. However, analysis indicated no significant differences between short-tenured and long-tenured employees in their consumer-oriented deviance behaviors and commitment to the organization.

The cross-sectional nature and single-level data collection naturally put limitations on the generalizability of this research. The study does not examine alternative constructs that might mediate/moderate tested relationships, such as perceived empowerment, gender or risk, hence, future potential avenues for further inquiry are presented.

This research contributes to positive deviance theory and extends existing knowledge by developing an extensive model of motivational antecedents, a moderator and an outcome of consumer-oriented deviant behavior. For managers, this research provides valuable insights for organizations, which may create positive effects on service quality and a reduction in employee turnover.

In the increasingly competitive retail environment, retailers’ ability to elevate frontline employees’ customer orientation (CO) can make the difference between the success and failure of their stores. However, the question of how to enhance employee CO is a tricky one. It has been stated that employee CO is a stable work value or disposition that is consistent over time, and therefore, difficult to manage. However, one factor that might be an important driver of employee CO is the retailers’ ethical leadership behaviour. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to focus on exploring the links between retailers’ ethical leadership, frontline employee CO and frontline employee job satisfaction, job-related stress and turnover intentions.

For the purpose of this study, the authors develop five hypotheses about the retailers’ ethical leadership, frontline employee CO and frontline employee job satisfaction, job-related stress and turnover intentions. Using structural equation modelling, the authors test the hypotheses using a sample of 208 respondents from the Finnish retail industry.

As a first important contribution, the findings of the present study indicate that frontline employee perceptions of their retailer’s ethical leadership are strongly linked to employee CO. As a second contribution, our results suggest that employee CO is positively related to job satisfaction. As a third contribution, this study shows that frontline employee job satisfaction is negatively related to their turnover intentions.

This study contributes to service management and retail marketing literature by broadening the current understanding of the links between the ethical leadership of retailers, frontline employee CO and frontline employee job satisfaction, job-related stress and turnover intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of disabled service providers on customers’ evaluations of service quality and behavioural intentions.

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of online reviews from samples collected in a “dining-in-the-dark” restaurant, which employs blind waiters, and from a restaurant that employs deaf servers. The authors also put forth three quantitative analyses that use survey methodology.

Based on word clouds generated by online data, the findings show that customers treat the hiring of disabled service providers as the most prominent clue in their perceptions of organizational service quality. The quantitative results further illustrate that customers who hold more favourable attitudes towards disabled employees are more likely than other customers to spread positive word-of-mouth (WOM). Another analysis reveals that attitudes towards disabled employees are a separate construct from human compassion.

Customers’ attitudes towards disabled frontline service employees represent a service quality driver. The authors offer researchers an exploratory scale on consumer attitudes towards the hiring of disabled employees to further refine and develop for future validation.

Retail organizations may be able to obtain a competitive advantage by employing frontline disabled people through customer WOM communications. These communications are linked to positive organizational outcomes.

Retail and service researchers know considerably little about customers’ perceptions of interacting with disabled employees. This paper represents original research that encourages retail and service organization to employ disabled frontline employees.

This study aims to investigate whether frontline retail banking employees’ proactive personality helps in ameliorating customer engagement. This study further aims to investigate the mediational role of work engagement and service recovery performance in the employee proactivity – customer engagement relationship.

This study used a triadic approach for the collection of primary data. Each triad consisted of a customer, a frontline employee and an immediate colleague of the frontline employee. Structured questionnaires were used to solicit data from the respondents. Specifically, customers were asked to report their level of engagement with the bank and the recovery performance of the employee who redressed their grievances. Frontline employees responded to their level of work engagement while their colleagues reported about the proactive disposition of frontline employees at the workplace.

Empirical findings revealed under service scenario, Indian retail banking employees’ proactive disposition nurtures customer engagement. It was further observed that this relationship is sequentially mediated by work engagement and service recovery performance.

The role of frontline employees in enriching customer engagement has to date remained under-researched among marketing scholars. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the maiden attempt to relate frontline employee proactivity with customer engagement. Also, this study is one of the early research to investigate customer engagement under a service recovery context, thereby, opening pathways for further exploration.

The creativity of retail employees seems to be of the utmost importance for ensuring the performance of organizations in service settings. This paper contributes to the existing theory by investigating the direct and indirect effects of goal orientations on the creativity and performance of retail employees. The authors propose a framework depicting the relationships between goal orientations and employee creativity and performance, including the intervening effects of self-efficacy and customer orientation.

The study was conducted with retail frontline employees of a large retail bank in Portugal. The sample consists of 267 valid responses. Structural equations are used by applying the maximum likelihood method to test the conceptual framework.

Results are broadly supportive of the hypotheses. Learning orientation is, directly and indirectly, related to creativity, but only indirectly to performance. As to performance orientation, it is indirectly related to creativity through self-efficacy and customer orientation, and directly as well as indirectly, to performance. The authors investigate the extent to which the effects of goal orientations on creativity and performance are mediated by self-regulatory mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, and customer orientation.

The results recognize that learning and performance goals are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory, which collide with past empirical evidence showing that learning goals are generally associated with more favorable outcomes and performance goals with more negative or equivocal ones. These outcomes underscore the need and relevance for managers to foster both goal orientations to promote the creativity and performance of retail employees, representing a particularly salient issue in retail businesses characterized by significant interpersonal interactions.

Frontline service providers are a key touchpoint in a customer’s overall experience with a brand. Though they are recognized as important contributors to brand experiences, service providers have received relatively little attention in both experienced marketing and branding research. This paper aims to illuminate the importance of understanding factors that contribute to the role services providers play within the environmental context of the customer’s brand journey.

This study uses two experimental studies to show that greater customer happiness and customer loyalty could be achieved through collective brand personification whereby the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand persona and store environment.

Specifically, findings reveal that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness and greater brand authenticity when the service provider aligns with the retailer’s brand persona and store environment.

While this study gets us closer to understanding how managers can leverage human capital in the retail service environment, there are opportunities to further explore issues such as the impact of collective brand personification on the employee.

Given the strong desire companies have to bolster customer happiness to increase brand loyalty, the findings bolster the importance of understanding the influential factors associated with frontline service providers. Their role in creating optimal customer experiences should not be underestimated.

As an important cautionary note, firms should take care when creating the appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications by considering social norms and the impact on societal well-being (e.g. self-consciousness and exclusion can lead to serious illnesses and including depression). Study shows that people have an inherent need to feel accepted and belong to social groups that help to construct and affirm their self-concept, and appreciate opportunities that empower them to seize control against exclusion. Therefore, appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications should be strategically aligned with the image and goals of the firm, and not subject to management bias from an unconscious reaction to an applicant’s physical and interpersonal presentation.

The present study builds on both customer experience and branding literature by examining the relationship between customer happiness and collective brand personification – where the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand. Two experiments test the hypotheses that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness with the brand and the consumer’s perception of the brand’s authenticity when the customer service provider aligns with the brand’s identity and core values.

This study aims to provide empirically generated insights into the drivers of guardianship behaviour among frontline service employees (FLEs) within retail settings.

The research framework comprises a quantitative survey of 507 frontline service employees at national supermarkets within New Zealand.

The findings of the survey suggest that service employee perceptions of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, their level of psychological ownership towards the supermarket and personal moral beliefs, shape their guardianship behaviours and, consequentially, the prevention of in-store deviant behaviours by customers such as shoplifting.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers both a conceptual foundation and an empirical-based evaluation of the antecedents and role of guardianship behaviour among frontline service employees. Second, the conceptual model derived from this research may aid practitioners in developing strategies that engender guardianship behaviours in their employees within service contexts.

Branding has become a permanent source of competitive advantage for any leading business. Predominantly, it is execution inside the organization for employees. The purpose of this paper is to measure the influence of internal branding (IB) on customers-based brand equity (CBBE) and the mediating effect of organizational loyalty (OL) between two retail store chains of an under developing country (e.g. Pakistan).

This paper draws on primary data. Data were collected from frontline officers and customers of selected retail stores. Descriptive analysis, mediation analysis and independent sample t-test data analysis techniques were applied through smart PLS and SPSS.

The results of the study revealed that IB influences OL and CBBE. The outcomes showed the mediation effect of OL on the relationship between IB and CBBE partially. Furthermore, results of this papers also disclosed a difference in the levels of IB and OL in both organizations. But, there was no difference in the level of brand equity among customers of both retail stores.

The retail store sector is growing at fast pace with new innovations in all dimensions of the sector. These results could help the retail industry with empirical pieces of evidence to implement IB in their organizations to make the strong relationship between store and customer through efficient and well-trained frontline officers.

The study’s noteworthy contribution to the industry and academic world is the empirical support for the relationship between IB and CBBE. This study has explored the IB in the service sector (i.e. the retail store) from the non-western and under developing context.