Does organizational empowerment promote self-leadership in hotel management? An analysis based on employees' cultural value orientation

Abstract

Research suggests that employee self-leadership may effectively improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, the antecedents of employee self-leadership behaviors in the workplace have been underexplored in the literature, particularly in the context of the hospitality industry. Using the job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical framework, this study investigates a hypothesized moderated mediation model that includes the direct effects of organizational empowerment on self-leadership along with the conditional indirect effect of organizational empowerment on self-leadership through self-efficacy, as conditional on the level of employee uncertainty avoidance orientation. A questionnaire survey approach was used to collect data from a sample of 310 employees from 15 four-star and five-star hotels in Guangdong Province, the Southeast of Mainland China. The research results suggest that organization empowerment plays a positive role in enhancing self-leadership through the mediating effects of self-efficacy, with uncertainty avoidance moderating this positive indirect effect. Specifically, for people with low uncertainty avoidance the relationship is much stronger than for people with high uncertainty avoidance. Practical and research implications are discussed along with possible directions for future research.