Does a servant-leader affect restaurant’s experience ? A multilevel model of servant leadership, employee engagement, and customer outcomes

Abstract

Leadership has been identified as a major element in the managerial roles of hospitality managers. New Leadership behaviors views are currently in high demand for more people (employee, customer)-centered and ethical practices management to motivate the 21st-century workforce specifically in hospitality firms seeking to distinguish themselves. As a result, organizations are struggling to stay competitive from both the demand (customers) and the supply (employees) side due to many challenges. The current focus on training for restaurant managers primarily targets employee management, while an overlooked aspect is that managers' presence and leadership style also significantly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Against this background, academics and practitioners have been trying to discover the most effective leadership style to meet not only the service organizational goals efficiently and effectively but also to keep the followers motivated and to serve their needs and all other stakeholders' (i.e., employees, customers, communities). Among these leadership studies, specifically for the hospitality industry, servant leadership is regarded as an effective leadership style. This uniqueness of servant leadership makes it one of the leadership models that would allow the relationship between the employees and customers to occur and be tested in one model and could be employee- and customer-centered. By attempting to understand to what extent servant-led followers' engagement and customer outcomes are influenced by servant leadership; this thesis explored further how servant leadership influence employee engagement, which in turn drive customer outcomes such as satisfaction and engagement, thus resulting in organizational success. Thesis results reveal the positive effect of servant leadership on customer satisfaction and customer engagement. As hypothesized, employee engagement is a mediator between servant leadership and customer outcomes. Managerial recommendations and theoretical contributions were discussed.