It takes three to tango: Leadership and hostility in the service encounter

Hana Medler-Liraz; Ronit Kark

doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.11.007

It takes three to tango: Leadership and hostility in the service encounter

Hana Medler-Liraz, Ronit Kark

Department of Psychology

Academic College of Tel-Aviv - Yaffo

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

Leadership effectiveness is contingent on the ability to affect followers' emotions. This paper explores a model suggesting that the quality of the relationships between leaders and their followers (LMX) relates negatively to a display of negative emotions by employees during their interactions with customers, and subsequently relates to employees' performance and customers' emotions. The model was tested on a sample of 95 service employees and on 485 interactions between these employees and their customers. The findings show that LMX was negatively related to the display of hostility by employees towards their customers. Employee hostility was negatively related to employees' ability to provide a solution to customers' problems, which was further related to customers' hostility towards employees. We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	81-93
Number of pages	13
Journal	Leadership Quarterly
Volume	23
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.11.007
State	Published - Feb 2012

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Authors' Notes. We wish to express our great appreciation to Micha Popper who generously provided constructive, challenging and thoughtful feedback at earlier stages of this study. We are thankful to Sharon Daniel for her assistance with data collection and to Meni Koslowsky, Boas Shamir, the anonymous LQ reviewers and Editor for their helpful feedback. We are grateful for the financial support of the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 984/05 ).

Funding

Authors' Notes. We wish to express our great appreciation to Micha Popper who generously provided constructive, challenging and thoughtful feedback at earlier stages of this study. We are thankful to Sharon Daniel for her assistance with data collection and to Meni Koslowsky, Boas Shamir, the anonymous LQ reviewers and Editor for their helpful feedback. We are grateful for the financial support of the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 984/05 ).

Funders	Funder number
Israel Science Foundation	984/05

Keywords

Hostility
Leader-member exchange (LMX)
Leadership
Service encounter

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10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.11.007

Cite this

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abstract = "Leadership effectiveness is contingent on the ability to affect followers' emotions. This paper explores a model suggesting that the quality of the relationships between leaders and their followers (LMX) relates negatively to a display of negative emotions by employees during their interactions with customers, and subsequently relates to employees' performance and customers' emotions. The model was tested on a sample of 95 service employees and on 485 interactions between these employees and their customers. The findings show that LMX was negatively related to the display of hostility by employees towards their customers. Employee hostility was negatively related to employees' ability to provide a solution to customers' problems, which was further related to customers' hostility towards employees. We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.",

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It takes three to tango: Leadership and hostility in the service encounter

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

Access to Document

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