It takes a village: examining how and when brand-specific transformational leadership affects employees in internal brand management

The hospitality work environment presents many unique challenges for employees and organizations, such as the intertwined and collective work nature, implicit job expectations, and a shrinking labor market. The demand for highly skilled employees who are sufficient to deliver the unique brand values to customers is on the rise for building successful service brands through employees. The need to retain talented employees is further intensified by the “great resignation” movement in the USA along with the COVID-19 pandemic. This study demonstrates the positive role of brand-specific transformational leadership in promoting employees’ highly engaged brand building behavior (investment-of-self) and their resistance to outside competing job offers. More importantly, drawing upon cognitive dissonance theory, this study shows that the impact of brand-specific transformational leadership is mediated by employees’ sense of brand community internally, as well as moderated by perceived brand promise accuracy. These results supported the essential role of achieving employees’ cognitive consonance in brand communication both internally and externally. These results are supported by 203 US hospitality employee responses from multiple data collections purposefully designed with temporal and cognitive distance.