The spillover effect of supportive leadership on brand image through employee brand building behavior

Through the organization management literature review, we know that the leadership style moulds the employee behaviors (Li & Wang, 2009). Due to the characteristics of service, such as intangibility and high personal interaction between customers and firm's employees during the service delivery process, the attitudes and behaviors of service people influence the customer perceptions. Therefore, the employee brand building behavior (EBBB), which is the bridge between the organization internal brand communications and customers perceived brand image. The study examines the spillover effect of supportive leadership on brand image through EBBB. We conducted a survey with over 1400 participants, consisted of 400 employees and over 1000 customers in 4 hotels in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, China. The authors used the HLM path analysis to test the effect of organizational climate of supportive leadership on the EBBB and test the cross-level effect of EBBB on the customers perceived brand image. The HLM results of data analysis reveal that (1) organizational supportive leadership has a significant effect on the EBBB; (2) organizational leadership climates have a spillover effect on customer level, such as the influence of organizational leadership flows to customers perceived brand image through the employee behaviors. This study enriches the theory about the spillover effect of organizational leadership on customer level. The findings contribute to help the service firm pay more attention to mould a supportive leadership climate to encourage the EBBB which will lead to a positive brand image.