Purpose Customer sweethearting is a common illicit behavior of frontline employees in service firms. This paper aims to examine the impact of supportive–disloyal leadership behavior on customer sweethearting at different levels of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on imitation theory and need-to-belong theory, the paper builds a conceptual model and empirically tests it using data from a survey-based study and a complementary experiment. Findings The authors find that employees’ customer sweethearting is affected by their supervisors’ supportive–disloyal behavior (employee sweethearting) through two divergent paths: employees imitate the sweethearting behavior of their supervisors; and employee sweethearting triggers employees’ feelings of belongingness to their organization, which reduces their customer sweethearting behavior. Practical implications The findings suggest that service firms can mitigate customer sweethearting by raising awareness that supervisors act as negative role models to subordinates and fostering high-quality LMX relationships, which give employees a sense of belonging to the supervisor and the organization. Originality/value By taking supervisors’ supportive–disloyal leadership behavior as an ambivalent driver of customer sweethearting into account, this paper provides further insight into the occurrence of customer sweethearting, particularly its underlying contrasting psychological mechanisms.

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Despite the great emphasis organizations and human resource management (HRM) research place on turnover issues, one turnover phenomenon has received only limited attention so far: joint leader-member turnover. This research examines supervisor-initiated turnover (SIT) (i.e., employees' decision to quit their employer to follow a former supervisor to a new organization) and develops a comprehensive model of the SIT decision process, grounded on conservation of resources (COR) theory, that delineates the resource evaluation, conservation and investment deliberations of employees. We take a relational perspective and particularly focus on the leader-member relationship as an important antecedent of SIT and thereby respond to the call for more critical investigations of leader-member exchange (LMX) and corresponding HRM implications. Our three studies (survey, scenario experiment, and dyadic interview study) demonstrate that LMX positively affects SIT intentions (SITI) and that supervisor commitment represents an important mediating mechanism of the LMX-SITI relationship. Our interview study with 46 leader-member dyads identifies relational factors that promote or hinder SIT beyond the leader-member relationship. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications for HRM.

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