Brand-specific Leadership: on Its Effects and Trainability

The task of encouraging employees to build and strengthen an organization?s brand image ? that is, encouraging them to act as "brand champions" ? is a challenge for businesses high in customer interaction. In this effort, supervisors play a critical role as they are the ones who need to motivate and guide employees' brand building behavior. But what can managers actually do to have employees act on behalf of the corporate brand? The author Felicitas Morhart answers this question in a twofold way: First, in terms of what managers should do and second, in terms of what managers are able to do. She therefore presents results of two studies. In a first study, she shows which leadership style is most effective for enabling brand-building behaviors among employees and the psychological processes involved. In a second study, she examines the question of whether it is possible for managers to learn the very leadership style that has been identified as superior in the first study.