Leading for Resilience: Fostering Employee and Organizational Resilience in Tourism Firms

Abstract

Grounded in conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study identifies the effect of leadership behaviors on the resilience of tourism firms and employees in Sri Lanka during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. The developed conceptual model links the resilient leadership behaviors of vision sharing, leadership of tasks, and management of change with employee resilience (cognitive, behavioral, and contextual) and organizational resilience (planned and adaptive). The findings highlight that resilient leadership behaviors in the early stages of the pandemic enhanced both employee and organizational resilience. The contextual and behavioral dimensions of employee resilience mediated the effect of resilient leadership behaviors on organizational resilience. The study offers suggestions for the development of organizational resilience and the specific support that may facilitate the recovery of the tourism sector from the COVID-19 crisis.

Relationship between resilience at work, work engagement and job satisfaction among engineers: a cross-sectional study

“…This can be clarified by referring to the conservation of resources theory (COR) which focuses on resources and suggests that individuals are motivated to protect and develop their personal resources in order to flourish and deal with stress. Individuals with high levels of personal resources are more likely to show resilience [ 26 ]. As a result, resilient individuals are better prepared to handle job demands and setbacks, preserving their resources and maintaining high levels of work engagement.…”

Fostering Employee Customer-Oriented Boundary Spanning Behaviors: The Role of Inclusive Leadership

“…Recovering from the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism organizations are now in urgent need of restoring positive customer relationship and continuously improving their customer service (Farzanegan et al, 2021;Kimbu et al, 2023;Li et al, 2021;Prayag et al, 2023). As boundary spanners working at the customer-organization interface (Bettencourt et al, 2005), FSEs link customers with the tourism organization and their COBSBs, which incorporate both in-role (i.e., service delivery behavior) and extra-role service behavior (i.e., external representation behavior and internal influence behavior), contribute to the ongoing enhancement of customer service and the cultivation of strong customer relationships.…”

“…The COVID-19 epidemic has posed significant challenges to achieving excellent service performance in the tourism industry and has been proven to undermine the relationship between service suppliers and customers (Farzanegan et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Prayag et al, 2023). At the customer-organization interface, frontline service employees (FSEs)' customer-oriented boundary spanning behaviors (COBSBs), encompassing service delivery behavior, external representation behavior, and internal influence behavior (Podsakoff et al, 2000), are vital for tourism organizations to recover customer relationships and ensure ongoing service improvements.…”

Is Social tourism a vector for destination resilience to external shocks? Evidence from Spain.

“…Duro et al, 2022). In addition, there are also recent papers dealing with resilience of tourism organizations and firms (Chowdhury et al, 2019;Prayag, Jiang et al, 2023), and the tourism workforce (Kimbu et al, 2023;Prayag, Muskat, & Dassanayake, 2023).…”