An Empirical Study of Internal Branding on Organizational Citizenship Behaviours: The Mediating Roles of Work Engagement and Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Building a strong brand in the service industry is critical today as competition in the industry has become more intense than ever before. Intensified competition among the service organizations has called for the internal brand concept. Internal branding is considered as promoting the branding inside the organisation to leverage the brand image by aligning the organisation values with the employee values. Hence, considering this factor, the present study seeks to examine the effect of internal branding on employees attitudes like work engagement, job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviours of the front line employees working in the public sector banks of south India. To examine the effect of internal branding on organizational citizenship behaviours of the front line employees through work engagement and job satisfaction, a conceptual model was designed with social exchange theory as the theoretical framework. The present study considered internal communications, training and rewards as the manifestations of Internal branding in measuring employee attitudes and behaviours. Samples of 817 front line employees were chosen for the study. The study found internal branding leverages the employees' organizational citizenship behaviours through work engagement and job satisfaction. Interestingly, the study found that work engagement fails to measure organizational citizenship behaviours towards customers in the front line. Similarly, front line employees' job satisfaction proved an insignificant relationship with organizational citizenship behaviours towards coworkers. This study suggests implications for the service domain, especially the banking sector, since public sector banks face extreme competition with private and foreign banks. Moreover, in this perspective, front line employees' attitudes and behaviours play a vital role in improving the bank's effectiveness.