Abstract
Servant leadership has attracted scholars' and business practice attention in searching for a practical leadership style to support the development of employees' high-quality customer service performance. However, limited research can be found that discusses the relationship between servant leadership and Customer-Oriented Behaviour in the hospitality sector, particularly in the Australian context. Based on the attributes of servant leadership and the employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour, this study explores the influence of servant leadership attributes on employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour. The findings indicated that servant leadership attributes such as stewardship, empowerment and service influence employee's behaviour and enable them to deliver high-quality service as expected. This research aims to explore the influence of servant leadership attributes on employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour. Additionally, it is anticipated that the outcome of this research could contribute knowledge to the business and management literature. To answer the research questions, this research applied a qualitative approach to explore the influence of servant leadership attributes on employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour. Moreover, this study uses multiple case studies from five hotels in Australia to get an in-depth explanation of a particular phenomenon and to obtain any pattern when exploring the thematic aspects of the participants. Based on the findings and thematic analysis, managers who possesses servant leadership attributes may be influenced on the employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour. This is because some of the key attributes of servant leadership, like stewardship, empowerment, and service, exhibited by the hotel managers when managing their employees, influenced the employee performance when servicing customers. Moreover, this study has identified key challenges in the hospitality industry from the managerial point of view. The research outcome includes several recommendations for leadership study and hotel management. One of the recommendations for leadership study is based on the compilationiv and findings of the literature review. More studies are needed to identify one or two essential servant leadership attributes that influence the employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour in the hospitality sector. Furthermore, this study provided three recommendations for hotel management such as design training, coaching and mentoring program on servant leadership, identifying talent that has servant leadership attributes in the recruitment and selections process and establishing a genuine relationship with the employees and to establish organic engagement with employees. This study also suggested that managers should invest their time in observing the customer reviews platform to understand the customers experience when visiting the hotel and to reflect the service that they provide is within the expectation. Furthermore, in regard to the first recommendation for hotel management, design training, coaching and mentoring program. Some participants argue that there are training programs available in the hotel for the managerial level; however, particular training on servant leadership may be beneficial to improve their leadership knowledge and enhance their skills in managing employees. Besides servant leadership training, this study also recommends a mentoring program between the aspiring manager and an experienced manager with servant leadership attributes. The second recommendation is to search for talents with servant leadership attributes such as service, humility, caring, and listening. Studies indicated that the attributes would likely accelerate the shaping of employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour. The third recommendation is to establish organic employees' engagement and create a genuine relationship between managers and their employees. Based on the findings, managers use guidelines and tools such as surveys to engage with their team. Although employee surveys are a valuable tool to scale employee engagement and satisfaction with the business; however, creating activities outside work hours may increase rapport between the managers and employees. This study addressed several limitations of the study. Firstly, this study only explored servant leadership attributes based on the ten attributes suggested in the literature. Although more attributes surfaced as more studies emerged, however, for this study's purposes, this refers only to some attributes from the ten main attributes and functional attributes. In addition, this study narrowed it down from ten attributes to three attributes that may influence employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour.v Secondly, the limitation surrounding research location and cultural background aspects. This study was conducted at five hotels located in Australia, and the participants who are managers shared their experience managing employees in the hotel industry in Australia. Thus, this study knows cultural differences between Australia and other countries may exist. For example, a hotel manager in Asia may have a different approach to managing the employee than one in Australia. However, this study wishes that the findings and recommendations could provide ideas and alternative approaches that can be adopted based on their cultural context. Thirdly, this study cannot explore more of the insights gathered from the hotel managers because of time constraints. The hotel managers addressed a more complex problem that correlated with the leadership style and Customer-Oriented Behaviour. Lastly, this study acknowledged its limitation in only interviewing hotel managers, not employees. The discussion on employee's Customer-Oriented Behaviour is perceived by managers.