Leadership of service employees - A narrative review

Employees who have customer contact play a crucial role in the success of service organizations. Therefore, leadership of customer contact employees is a core element of service management. In direct customer contact, employees have to act on at least two levels: on the level of solving customers’ problems, which is the core service; and on the relational level, on which they have to influence customers’ emotions and affect in order to increase customers’ satisfaction with the service interaction. While leadership with respect to solving customers’ problems can be enacted via well-established management techniques, it requires a more specific approach with regard to the relational level. In this regard, leaders have to establish positive relations to their employees in the same way as to customers. This enables leaders to influence the emotions of employees in a similar way as they influence the emotions of customers. By conducting a narrative review of existing research, we aim to show how leaders can establish positive relations with employees and influence their emotions. Specifically, we show that transformational leadership and establishing leader–member exchange are of particular importance.