Specifically, until a greater number of studies covering a wider range of
hospitality contexts and research questions have been published, it will remain
difficult to draw upon precedents from within hospitality studies to inform the
design of new research – or indeed, to draw upon any kind of conceptual
framework of hospitality-leadership studies to frame new and relevant research
topics and questions.
The only prior review of hospitality leadership studies was undertaken by Pittaway
et al. (1998) who were concerned that leadership as a topic of research within
hospitality studies had been neglected and, accordingly, set out to construct a
research agenda for the future development of the field. They developed a
paradigmatic taxonomy derived from their analysis of a cross-sectional sample of
generic leadership studies. The fourfold taxonomy was created by firstly
establishing the ontological perspective of each paper as regards the human
nature dimension – that is, the assumptions made regarding the extent to which
human behaviour is influenced by voluntary (i.e. autonomous) or deterministic
(i.e. governed by external environmental) factors. Secondly, the organisational
level (executive versus lower levels) at which each study had been applied (the
leadership type dimension) was assessed. Thirdly, the authors combined these
analyses to identify four paradigmatic approaches to leadership studies. The
characteristics of the generic leadership studies which had been pursued within
each of these paradigms was then described and, based on these characteristics,
appropriate research themes and questions for future hospitality leadership
studies were proposed.
The specific purpose of the paradigms is to ‘...present a clearer view of leadership
and identify how further leadership research could benefit the hospitality industry’
(Pittaway et al. 1998: 408). Figure 3 - 2 summarises the key aspects of each of
the four paradigms of leadership research identified by Pittaway et al.
However, while the taxonomy generated useful and apposite research questions
for hospitality leadership studies, it does not contribute to the field in a way which
assists future researchers to build on previous (applied) research and advance the
field through progressive, critical and augmentative evolution. This shortcoming
of the paradigmatic taxonomy is largely due to the fact that it is based primarily
on ontological differences between studies in the generic leadership studies field;
in contrast, a process of deductive-orientated development requires a critical and
iterative interaction with applied (context-specific) studies.