Rupam Konar, Faizan Ali & Kashif Hussain
Abstract:
The hospitality industry is a service industry that is constantly evolving with innovated service models, especially the hotel sector. However, hotel sector jobs are always associated with low paid salaries, unstable employment procedures, socially undesirable working hours and low-esteem job status with poor benefits. In such conditions, service leaders require high levels of motivation, work values, job attributes and job satisfaction in order to effectively interact with both customers and subordinates. Most hotel management recognise that effective leadership is one of the most powerful competitive advantage that one can possess through employee job satisfaction; alternatively, several research findings identify that job satisfaction and leadership effectiveness may not have a linear relationship but rather it intercedes through the level of empowerment given to service leaders and distinguished further by gender. This study examines how the antecedents of job satisfaction influence leadership effectiveness and further tests the mediating effect of empowerment between them whilst moderating across male and female frontline service leaders. A total of 118 supervisory and managerial level employees from four (4) five-star hotels in Klang Valley were surveyed using a self-administrative survey questionnaire. The PLS-SEM approach was used to assess the higher-order moderated mediation model. One of the major findings reveal that all the antecedents of job satisfaction are positively related to the endogenous variable; interestingly, empowerment partially mediates the relationship between job satisfaction and leadership effectiveness across both genders. With regard to practical implications, it is important for hotel management teams to appraise the identified underlying factors as these increase employees’ performance which boost the overall service quality of the organisation and meet organisational goals.
Keywords: Leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, empowerment, hospitality, gender, moderated mediation, PLS-SEM, Malaysia