Muhammad Imad Ud Din Akbar

The current research provides a conceptual framework that explains how sales managers' aggression across business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations triggers salespeople's surface acting, deep acting and service recovery performance. It also investigates the moderating role of ethical leadership through sales managers' aggressiveness on service recovery performance. The authors test the model using multilevel analysis with cross-sectional data of 367 salespeople from different sales organizations. The study shows that the aggression of sales managers has an adverse influence on service recovery performance. Additionally, aggressiveness among sales managers is positively connected with surface acting while adversely affecting deep acting. The study’s findings also indicate that ethical sales leadership is positively moderate among sales managers' aggressiveness and service recovery performance. The authors collected data from individual salespersons, which is the limitation; however, future studies could collect data using the dyadic approach, such as matching responses from both managers and salespersons. This method could enhance the model's internal validity. Several studies have mainly focused on positive supervision styles in the literature on service recovery. At the same time, building a negative supervision model in the B2B service recovery context, which has been persistently ignored, is noteworthy.

Organizations are actively involved in relationship marketing (RM) activities to strengthen their connections with customers. The current study discusses the multidimensional constructs of relationship marketing and its influence on customers’ brand attachment in the hotel sector, taking into account the sequential mediation of attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty between relationship marketing and purchase intention constructs. In order to collect the research data, we distributed questionnaires among 304 hotel customers and used SEM technique to analyze the hypotheses. The findings revealed that four dimensions of relationship marketing played a critical role in improving customers’ brand attachment. Furthermore, brand attachment has a significant and positive impact on behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty. In addition, brand attachment, attitudinal loyalty, and behavioral loyalty have proved as significant serial mediators between the linkage of relationship marketing and purchase intentions. We also discussed the study’s theoretical and managerial implications.