Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when customers influence organizational climate and organizational health through their feedback. Based on affective events theory, the authors classify both positive and negative customer feedback (PCF and NCF) as affective work events. The authors expect that these events influence the positive affective climate of an organization and ultimately organizational health, and that the relationships are moderated by empowerment climate. Design/methodology/approach-Structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze survey data obtained from a sample of 178 board members, 80 HR representatives, and 10,953 employees from 80 independent organizations. Findings-The findings support the expected indirect effects. Furthermore, empowerment climate strengthened the impact of PCF on organizational health but does not affect the relationship between NCF and organizational health. Research limitations/implications-The cross-sectional design is a potential limitation of the study. Practical implications-Managers should be aware that customer feedback influences an organization's emotional climate and organizational health. Based on the results organizations might actively disseminate PCF and establish an empowerment climate. With regard to NCF, managers might consider the potential affective and health-related consequences for employees and organizations. Social implications-Customers are able to contribute to an organization's positive affective climate and to organizational health if they provide positive feedback to organizations. Originality/value-By providing first insights into the consequences of both PCF and NCF on organizational health, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry of customer influences on employees at the organizational level.

Confronted with increasing digitalization, service firms are challenged to sustain customer loyalty. A promising means to do so is to leverage the digital presence of service employees on their website. A large-scale field study and several experimental studies show that the digital presence of service employees on the firm website increases current website service quality perceptions and positively shapes memories related to employee service quality perceptions from past service encounters. Both effects indirectly increase customer loyalty and, in turn, financial performance, and are amplified by employee accessibility and a service firm’s customer orientation. The authors examine further boundary conditions for the memory process: only service employees evoke the beneficial spillover effect to employee service quality perceptions, and the spillover effect does not generalize to evaluations of product quality. Remarkably, an employee’s digital presence, although factually unrelated, augments customer perceptions of service employees’ competence and commitment and thus strengthens rather than erodes service employees’ role in customer–firm relationships. Theoretical and managerial implications deepen the understanding of how to add a human touch to digital channels.

Leaders are expected to enhance the work meaningfulness of followers, but little insight exists on the role of leaders' own experience of meaningfulness in that process.We propose a leader-follower transfer model of work meaningfulness through visionary leadership, grounded in self-concept-based theory, in which leader-follower dyadic tenure shapes the effects of visionary leadership on followers. Moreover, we suggest that work meaningfulness can enhance followers' goal achievement and reduce turnover intentions. We tested and confirmed our moderated-mediation model in two independent, multisource, multilevel field data sets of 79 mid-level leaders and 871 employees in Study 1 and 68 CEOs and 596 mid-level leaders in Study 2. We also empirically ruled out a series of alternative transfer mechanisms, including transformational and transactional leadership, leader-member exchange, and all subdimensions of transformational leadership. This research contributes to the scholarly discussions on work meaningfulness and visionary leadership and offers novel insights for practitioners to enhance work meaningfulness in their organizations.

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Leaders influence followers’ meaning and play a key role in shaping their employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. While the dominant perspective in theory and in empirical work focuses on the positive influence of leaders on followers’ work meaningfulness, our conceptual model explores conditions in which leaders may harm followers’ sense of meaning. We introduce six types of conditions: leaders’ personality traits, leaders’ behaviors, the relationship between leader and follower, followers’ attributions, followers’ characteristics, and job design under which leaders’ meaning making efforts might harm or ‘kill’ followers’ sense of work meaningfulness. Accordingly, we explore how these conditions may interact with leaders’ meaning making efforts to lower levels of followers’ sense of meaning, and in turn, lead to negative personal outcomes (cynicism, lower well-being, and disengagement), as well as negative organizational outcomes (corrosive organizational energy, higher turnover rates, and lower organizational productivity). By doing so, our research extends the current literature, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of leaders’ influence on followers’ work meaningfulness, while considering the dark side of meaning making.