Based on the theoretical insights from the newly arising concept of ¡§Employee Brand¡¨, this study seeks to explore the relationships between transformational leadership, human resource branding involvement, employee brand and employee brand behavior. Adapting the methodology of releasing 2-level survey to domestic hotels, this study aims to examine the impact of transformational leadership and HR branding involvement on employee brand and brand behavior. The 34 organizational-level questionnaires answered by the HR supervisors and the 326 individual-level questionnaires by the frontline employees were analyzed by descriptive statistics, exploratory factors, reliability, linear regression, and hierarchical linear models. The findings of the research indicates that transformational leadership influences the employee brand and therefore results in the brand behavior delivering brand values. In addition, employee brand behavior is also relevant to HR branding involvement. The contribution of this paper lies in the focus of how leadership and HR involvement affect employee¡¦s understanding and willingness of delivering brand values, which was not previously discussed in other relative documents.

Service firms increasingly need to rely on other attributes than traditional quality and performance of their service employees to become and stay truly competitive. Strong brands are essential for differentiation in today's marketplace and it becomes naturally important to align the customer contact employees with the company brand to ensure consistency in all communication externally. For a service firm employee to fully enact the brand and display on brand behavior outwards it is pivotal to make them truly committed to the brand and organization. Internal branding processes have been shown to be an enabler of employee commitment to the organizational brand. While internal branding is stated to have a connection to commitment, the concept as such is according to Meyer & Allen (1991) constituted by three dimensions, normative, affective and continuance commitment. The bulk of the existing research has so far focused on internal branding and commitment as a single construct and not these dimensions. Much of this research is in addition limited to a few service sectors.The aim of this study was to determine the components of internal branding in order to clarify the relationship between internal branding and brand commitment of customer contact employees. The empirical investigation was conducted in the retail sector from the perspective of the customer contact employee by the use of a self-completion questionnaire measuring the affective commitment of the employees and the presence of the internal branding activities. The conceptual model for the study shows hypothesized positive relationships between the four internal branding activities and affective commitment. However, while all internal branding activities were significantly present, only three of these were found to have a significant positive relationship to affective commitment, excluding internal communication.The conclusions of this study gives managers of customer contact employee’s insights about how to enable affective commitment through the use of internal branding. Our results show that brand oriented training, recruitment and leadership all have a significant impact on affective commitment of customer contact employees. Although they had similar Beta values, brand oriented leadership showed a slightly higher predicting power indicating that leadership can play a greater role regarding the affective commitment of customer contact employees.