Now showing 1 - 10 of 49
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How family CEOs affect employees’ feelings and behaviors: A study on positive emotions

2022-03-07 , Kammerlander, Nadine , Menges, Jochen , Herhausen, Dennis , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Bruch, Heike

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Face Forward: How Employees’ Digital Presence on Service Websites Affects Customer Perceptions of Website and Employee Service Quality

2020-07-15 , Herhausen, Dennis , Emrich, Oliver , Grewal, Dhruv , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Schögel, Marcus

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The Impact of Customer Contact on Collective Human Energy in Firms

2019-07-02 , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Bruch, Heike , Herhausen, Dennis

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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How and when customer feedback influences organizational health

2016 , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Herhausen, Dennis , Bruch, Heike

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when customers influence organizational climate and organizational health through their feedback. Based on affective events theory, the authors classify both positive and negative customer feedback (PCF and NCF) as affective work events. The authors expect that these events influence the positive affective climate of an organization and ultimately organizational health, and that the relationships are moderated by empowerment climate. Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze survey data obtained from a sample of 178 board members, 80 HR representatives, and 10,953 employees from 80 independent organizations. Findings – The findings support the expected indirect effects. Furthermore, empowerment climate strengthened the impact of PCF on organizational health but does not affect the relationship between NCF and organizational health. Research limitations/implications – The cross-sectional design is a potential limitation of the study. Practical implications – Managers should be aware that customer feedback influences an organization’s emotional climate and organizational health. Based on the results organizations might actively disseminate PCF and establish an empowerment climate. With regard to NCF, managers might consider the potential affective and health-related consequences for employees and organizations. Social implications – Customers are able to contribute to an organization’s positive affective climate and to organizational health if they provide positive feedback to organizations. Originality/value – By providing first insights into the consequences of both PCF and NCF on organizational health, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry of customer influences on employees at the organizational level.

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Start with why: the transfer of work meaningfulness from leaders to followers and the role of dyadic tenure

2022 , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Raes, Anneloes , Herhausen, Dennis , Kark, R. , Bruch, Heike

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How buying less is being more: Integrating ethical consumption into business education

2020 , Sekerka, Leslie , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Stimel, Derek , Bagozzi, Richard

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‘Killing me softly with his/her song’: How leaders dismantle followers’ sense of work meaningfulness

2018-05-09 , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Kark, Ronit

Leaders influence followers’ meaning and play a key role in shaping their employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. While the dominant perspective in theory and in empirical work focuses on the positive influence of leaders on followers’ work meaningfulness, our conceptual model explores conditions in which leaders may harm followers’ sense of meaning. We introduce six types of conditions, i.e. leaders’ personality traits, leaders’ behaviors, the relationship between leader and follower, followers’ attributions, followers’ characteristics, and job design under which leaders’ meaning making efforts might harm or ‘kill’ followers’ sense of work meaningfulness. Accordingly, we explore how these conditions may interact with leaders’ meaning making efforts to lower levels of followers’ sense of meaning, and in turn, lead to negative personal outcomes (i.e., cynicism, lower well-being, and disengagement), as well as negative organizational outcomes (i.e., corrosive organizational energy, higher turnover rates, and lower organizational productivity). By doing so, our research extends the current literature, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of leaders’ influence on followers’ work meaningfulness, while considering the dark side of meaning making.

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Start with why: The transfer of work meaningfulness from leaders to followers and the role of dyadic tenure

2022-06-22 , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Raes, Anneloes , Herhausen, Dennis , Kark, Ronit , Bruch, Heike

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One size doesn't fit all: How construal fit determines the effectiveness of organizational brand communication

2019 , Herhausen, Dennis , Henkel, Sven , Kipfelsberger, Petra

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The impact of family management on employee well-being: A multilevel study

2017-01 , Kammerlander, Nadine , Kipfelsberger, Petra , Herhausen, Dennis

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.