employee empowerment (perceptions of influence) contributes to enhanced
employee work attitudes; and
positive employee work attitudes contribute to enhanced employee job
performance.
The research also:
operationalised the work meaning concept (from the transformational
leadership literature) and evaluated the hitherto unmeasured (positive) effect
of motivational leadership on employees’ work meaning;
evaluated the hitherto (in hospitality studies) unmeasured (positive) effect of
job satisfaction on job performance; and
built upon the work of Hinkin and Tracey (1996) and Tracey and Hinkin (1994)
by measuring a positive effect of motivational leadership on employees’ levels
of mission clarity (understanding of organisational objectives).
Additionally, the research undertook a detailed review of the existing leadership-
related hospitality research literature and found that after almost 40 years of
research effort, the field remains at an early stage of evolutionary development.
This finding was reached based on the assessment that the field is characterised
by a lack of volume and depth and also a general absence of iterative and
augmentative research progress where critiques of concepts, approaches and
findings are addressed by subsequent research studies. Furthermore, the
research recommends that to progress hospitality leadership research in an
iterative and augmentative way, researchers should build upon the approaches
and findings of prior research.
In contrast to Pittaway et al.’s (1998) earlier review of hospitality leadership
research (in which the authors’ recommendations for future research questions
were based on an analysis of ontological approaches to generic leadership
research) the recommendation for the way forward generated by the current
research focus not on outlining specific questions for future research, but on
addressing the previous lack of augmentative, iterative development (i.e. by
critically building upon previous approaches and findings) to help evolve the field.
Table 8 - 1 below describes the effect size for each of the relationships confirmed
by the research. Following Table 8 - 1 is a discussion of the implications of the
findings for theory and practice. During this discussion, the contributions of the