used in the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and adds a service
focused component to make the construct to the hospitality service context.
In a hospitality service context, the extra effort outcome of transformational
leadership can very clearly be viewed as an organisational- or team-level
outcome, since positive customer-focused effort – the moment of truth (Carlzon
(1987) - is a key goal for hospitality organisations. Work meaning, on the other
hand, can be conceptualised as an individual-level outcome. Accordingly, this
research seeks to evaluate the contribution of motivational leadership to both
organisational- and individual-level outcomes.
Measuring employee work meaning and evaluating its relationships with
motivational leadership and employee performance is intended to contribute not
only to social scientific understanding of leadership in hospitality contexts, but
also to our understanding of leadership outcomes in general since no studies
attempting to operationalise and measure work meaning in a leadership context
were identified during the course of this research.
In the following chapter, the research moves on to describe and critically evaluate
the applied (hospitality) leadership research literature. Identified articles are
classified according to their theoretical focus and the applied field is characterised
in order to create a state-of-the-art appraisal and to reveal knowledge gaps for
this and future research to address.