Fostering absorptive capacity and facilitating innovation in hospitality organizations through empowering leadership

Abstract

• Empowering leadership induces organizations to acquire and assimilate knowledge. • Empowering leadership activates knowledge transformation and exploitation. • Absorptive capacity toward managing knowledge bolsters corporate innovation. • Empowering leadership positively influences innovation through absorptive capacity. Empowering leadership facilitates a high-quality exchange of knowledge among employees. Although existing research highlights important contributions of empowering leadership at an employee level, there is little understanding of organizational mechanisms that benefit from this type of direction. Specifically, this study examined the connection of empowering leadership to the abilities of hospitality organizations to acquire and apply knowledge, namely absorptive capacity. Also, the relationships between absorptive capacity and multidimensional organizational innovation have been scarcely investigated. To bridge the research gap, this study used a time-lagged data collection method and examined a proposed structural model using the R Lavaan package. The results revealed empowering leadership had a positive relationship with potential and realized absorptive capacity. Absorptive capacity had a positive relationship with the product, process, and administrative innovation. Also, empowering leadership was indirectly associated with innovation through potential and realized absorptive capacity. Accordingly, contributions and implications of this study were discussed.