organisations which aim to proactively manage leadership-related issues should
recognise the influence of power bases.
The third hospitality leadership study which can be located in the Influential
Leadership paradigm is the desk-based study of Brownell (2010). Brownell
describes how “...influence is achieved through the act of service itself. This
characteristic is key, and it results in an egalitarian leader-follower relationship”
(2010: 366) and the study finds that servant leadership in the hospitality industry
has the potential to contribute to empowering hospitality employees and also to
workplace trust, respect and personal integrity.
Borchgrevink and Boster (1997) was classified in Table 3 - 1 and Table 3 - 2 as an
LMX paper rather than in the power-influence category. It was categorised this
way because LMX is the primary theoretical approach used in the study, however,
the significance of the power-related constructs in Borchgrevink and Boster’s LMX
model is sufficient to categorise the paper within Pittaway et al.’s Influential
Leadership paradigm.
Situational leadership paradigm
The Situational Leadership paradigm is typified by positivistic research focussing
on leadership in organisations and which seeks to examine the causal
relationships between leadership and number of other variables including
organisational characteristics, decision-making processes and hospitality industry
sector. The majority of the identified hospitality leadership studies (34 of the
total 44, or 77 per cent) fit within this paradigm, reflecting Pittaway et al.’s
finding that it is the most dominant paradigm in generic leadership studies.
3.11.2 The trouble with the taxonomy
Figure 3 - 3 illustrates how only a very small minority (4 papers representing 9.1
per cent) of empirical hospitality leadership studies focus solely on leadership of
organisations while a further three papers focus on both leadership in and of
organisations (6.8 per cent).