Leaders that professionally develop and empower employees receive more insights on customer complaints

Although the research fields of leadership and informal customer complaints management are studied extensively, empirical research examining their connections is still rare. Moreover, leaders need insights on customers’ complaints to be able to address such situations. We examine how leaders’ professional development of their frontline employees is a key driver of frontline employees’ willingness to forward customers’ complaints to them. With four studies, we demonstrate that professionally developing employees has a strong positive effect on their willingness to share customer complaints. Furthermore, we show that employees’ empowerment in complaint handling explains this relationship. Our results provide theoretically and practically relevant implications for leader recruiting and development to cultivate internal information sharing.