provide insights into leadership and motivation in hospitality contexts. This
avenue may prove fruitful since the review of hospitality leadership studies in
Chapter 3 above did not identify any studies adopting a path-goal theoretical
approach.
In summary, regarding the motivational leadership → mission clarity relationship,
this finding:
(i) builds upon the hospitality leadership work of Hinkin and Tracey ( 1994 ) and
Tracey and Hinkin ( 1996 ) by confirming the ML→MC relationship in an
independent sample; and
(ii) contributes to transformational leadership theory by successfully measuring
the effect of motivational leadership on employees’ mission clarity.
Model 8 also found that employee empowerment also had a significant positive
effect ( = 0.482) on employees’ mission clarity (MC). Mission clarity has been
conceptually related to empowerment processes in Section 7.16 above, which
reports how, for example, Lashley (1995, 1996) has discussed a shared sense of
purpose between managers and employees as an outcome of empowerment. The
discussion of the empowerment→mission clarity relationship will be addressed in
Section 8.3.5 below where the issue of integrating empowerment within future
hospitality leadership research is considered in greater detail.
The ‘holy grail’ of organisational psychology: Job Satisfaction → Job Performance
The consolidation (during the development of Model 3/3b) of the three employee
attitude constructs (Job Satisfaction, Work Meaning and Affective Organisational
Commitment) means that Hypothesis 6, Job Satisfaction → Job Performance
(JS→JP), cannot be measured as part of the larger model.
The successful (and consistent) measurement of this relationship has been called
the ‘holy grail’ of organisational studies (Landy 1985: 410; Weiss 2002: 184). Of
the seventeen hospitality studies identified for this research that included job
satisfaction in their analyses (see Section 5.3) however, none measured the
JS→JP relationship. To address this knowledge gap, a model was specified with
the Job Satisfaction construct as a predictor of Job Performance.