Service leadership and its influence on customer orientation, adaptive selling, in-role performance, and service recovery performance

Abstract

Recently, due to the important role of customers and the growing need for knowing all features regarding customers by providing access to sufficient information about different services and various ways for service delivery, it is crucial to identify problems associated with interacting with customers and keeping long-term relationships with them such as major factors affecting the hotels’ profitability and stability. The aim of the current study is to investigate the impact of service leadership on variables such as customer orientation, adaptive selling, service recovery performance, and in-role performance. A questionnaire-based survey was used for collecting data from 93 participants chosen through simple random sampling from among 145 employees and managers working at the service sectors of two-stars and higher-rated hotels of Isfahan city in Iran. The results of statistical analysis which obtained via the LISREL software through structural equation modeling proved that service leadership had a strong and positive influence on customer orientation, adaptive selling, service recovery (organizational citizenship behavior), and in-role performance (job performance), however, the minimum influence was attained from adaptive selling. It was also indicated that customer orientation had the most significant impact among all variables. Some recommendations for further research are also presented.