Leadership Styles and Customer Loyalty: A Lesson from Emerging Southeast Asia’s Airlines Industry

Abstract

This study provides the empirical testing to test the influences of contemporary leadership styles (i.e., transactional and transformational) on job satisfaction and customer satisfaction as the mediating variable between job satisfaction and customer loyalty. The approach utilized in this study was a quantitative research design using a survey model. The participants of this study were recruited from 160 front-liners in the airline's industry in Indonesia. This study employed 160 front liners (flight attendants, reservation/ticketing, and check-in-counter officers) who worked in Branch Office/General Sales Agent of Indonesian commercial airlines. The studied airlines serve domestic routes based at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. Furthermore, the data were examined the four developed hypotheses by using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The primary results are: First, in the context of job satisfaction, both leadership styles (i.e., transactional and transformational) have similar influences; Second, job satisfaction affects customer satisfaction positively and significant, Third, customer loyalty is driven by passengers' satisfaction when they are utilizing the airline services. The findings imply that the working-role encouragement is essential to maximize the productivity of front-liners to serve their customer well. This research supports on developing the general knowledge based on leadership styles in the context of the airline's industry in managing the human resources strategically.

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