From empowering leadership to proactive work behavior in hospitality: a study of multiple cross-level mediation processes

Abstract

PurposeOn the basis of the hierarchical organizational structure, this study investigated how empowering leadership influences hotel employees' proactive work behavior through multiple cross-level mediation processes. This study also investigated whether psychological empowerment, positive psychological capital, job characteristics and job embeddedness can activate the linkage of the aforementioned trickle-down effects.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws data from 826 international tourist hotel employees at different times with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses.FindingsMultiple cross-level mediation analyses indicate that (1) psychological empowerment mediates the cross-level influences of empowering leadership on job characteristics and positive psychological capital; (2) positive psychological capital mediates the cross-level influences of empowering leadership on job embeddedness and proactive work behavior; and (3) job embeddedness mediates the cross-level influences of psychological empowerment and job characteristics on proactive work behavior.Practical implicationsIn the post-pandemic era, the valuable trickle-down effects of empowering leadership could spill over into employees' positive beliefs of psychological empowerment, which ultimately benefit working responsibility and organizational operations.Originality/valueThe results support and suggest that maximizing the benefits of empowering leadership could eventually foster proactivity and performance in the workplace under hospitality and tourism settings.

Influence of social identity on service sabotage in hospitality organizations: cross-level roles of job embeddedness, organizational identification and supervisor support

“…In this social identity model, individuals can classify or categorize themselves as part of groups and use certain methods to reflect their feelings of well-being or self-worth (Stets and Burke, 2000; Tyler and Blader, 2003). Based on individuals’ sense of who they regarding their group memberships, this self-concept of social identity comprises individual psychological traits, capabilities, bodily attributes or salient group classifications (Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Wang, 2023) and can be distinguished into two diverse aspects of social behavior, namely, social- and personal-based identities (Tajfel, 1974; Dutton et al , 1994). In this manner, social identity theory focuses on reciprocal relationships with certain groups and people within these groups, and individuals define themselves in terms of these social referents (Ashforth and Mael, 1989).…”