Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    The Impact of Customer Contact on Collective Human Energy in Firms
    This paper investigates how and when a firm’s level of customer contact influences the collective organizational energy. For this purpose, we bridge the literature on collective human energy at work with the job impact framework and organizational sensemaking processes and argue that a firm’s level of customer contact is positively linked to the collective organizational energy because a high level of customer contact might make the experience of prosocial impact across the firm more likely. However, as prior research at the individual level has indicated that customers could also deplete employees’ energy, we introduce transformational leadership climate as a novel contingency factor for this linkage at the organizational level. We propose that a medium to high transformational leadership climate is necessary to derive positive meaning from customer contact, while firms with a low transformational leadership climate do not get energized by customer contact. We tested the proposed moderated mediation model with multilevel modeling and a multi-source dataset comprising 9,094 employees and 75 key informants in 75 firms. The results support our hypotheses and offer important theoretical contributions for research on collective human energy in organizations and its interplay with customers.
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    Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    The impact of family management on employee well-being: A multilevel study
    Non-family employees are an important resource in family firms; therefore, understanding their well-being is of utmost relevance for management theory. Integrating leadership theory into family business research, we draw from the emotional contagion and person-organization fit theories and argue that employee well-being in terms of organizational-level affective climate and individual-level job satisfaction is higher in firms managed by a family CEO. Moreover, we hypothesize that this relationship becomes stronger with higher levels of CEO transformational leadership and weaker with increasing CEO tenure. We test our hypotheses using a large-scale, multilevel dataset comprising 2,246 direct reports of the respective CEO and 41,531 employees from 497 family- and non-family-managed firms. By applying multilevel modeling, we found support for our proposed hypotheses. Post-hoc tests reveal that the positive effect of family management is particularly strong in first generation family firms. This article contributes to research on leadership and on family firms and advances the evidence-based debate about employees in those firms.
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    Scopus© Citations 4