3.8 Summary of hospitality leadership findings
The review above has found that within the identified studies that have utilised
leadership theory to investigate leadership-related phenomena in hospitality
contexts, there have been a broad range of approaches taken and a wide range of
findings.
The research questions that have been addressed are so diverse that it is not
possible to meaningfully reduce these into groups for the purpose of summarising
the collected findings. There is, however, one notable area that has not been
addressed in the hospitality leadership research. Specifically, that link between
leadership and job performance.
Only two hospitality leadership studies have addressed the link between
leadership and job performance. However, in both of these studies, the link
between leadership and employee performance is somewhat indirect: Clark et al.
measured employee commitment to service quality (rather than actual job
performance / service quality) while in Patiar and Mia’s study, service quality was
only one of four ‘non-financial performance’ components in the factor (alongside
repeat business, staff development and staff morale).
Clark et al. (2009) found that participative and empowering leadership styles had
an effect (β = 0.082 for participative and β = 0.088 for empowering) on
employees’ commitment to service-quality. Patiar and Mia (2009) found that
transformational leadership had a positive (β = 0.309) effect on a ‘non-financial
performance’ factor containing a customer service component.
Seventeen of the hospitality leadership studies had incorporated job satisfaction
as a variable of interest (Hawkins and Lee 1990; Borchgrevink and Boster 1994;
Ross and Boles 1994; Susskind et al. 2000a; Susskind et al. 2000b; Carbery et al.
2003; Testa 2004; Kim et al. 2005; Tutuncu and Kozak 2007; Chiang and Jang
2008; Deery 2008; Erkutlu 2008; Øgaard et al. 2008; Tsai 2008; Fei-Chuan et al.
2009; Kuruüzüm et al. 2009; Yang 2010).
These studies have measured the relationships between job satisfaction and a
number of other variables including organisational commitment (Hawkins and Lee
1990; Susskind et al. 2000b; Chiang and Jang 2008; Kuruüzüm et al. 2009),