Servant leadership and customer service quality at Korean hotels: Multilevel organizational citizenship behavior as a mediator

We proposed that employees’ individual- and group-level organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) would transmit the effect of servant leadership onto customer perception of service quality in the hotel context. Participants were 198 supervisors, lower-level customer-contact employees, and customers at South Korean hotels. Survey packets, comprising separate survey forms for each of the 3 groups of respondents, were distributed to the supervisors, who completed their own survey forms and provided the other versions of the survey form to the employees and customers. The results of the analysis of the matched responses supported the study hypotheses. We found that supervisors’ servant leadership was positively related to customers’ perception of level of service quality and that this positive relationship was mediated by both the hotel employees’ individual-level and group-level OCB. The findings suggest that, to improve customer service quality at hotels, supervisors need to facilitate the active performance by their staff of OCB both individually and as a group.