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This study aims to review the empirical studies on empowering leadership in hospitality and tourism and proposes an associated research agenda.

A disciplined selection process using transparent inclusion and exclusion criteria resulted in a final sample of 25 empirical studies. The research results from these studies were systematically analyzed using content analysis.

The synthesis of these articles highlights that: studies on empowering leadership in hospitality and tourism are mainly based on motivational theories and theories with a social orientation; empowering leadership has been examined within various cultures mostly using quantitative methods; multiple instruments are used to measure empowering leadership; and empowering leadership is a variously defined construct that has been found to promote creativity and innovation, service performance and various employee attitudes and behaviors.

The authors provide an integrated framework for empowering leadership in hospitality and tourism contexts, proposing theoretical implications and directions for further research.

This review identified growing research interest in empowering leadership in diverse hospitality and tourism contexts, as well as an increasing impetus to understand how leaders can effectively empower their subordinates.

The study provides a systematic understanding of empirical research examining the theoretical frameworks, antecedents, mediators, moderators and consequences of empowering leadership in various hospitality and tourism contexts. Significant opportunities remain for further research to address the gaps and limitations discovered.

To achieve business success in a competitive market, hospitality firms are urged to search for different ways to enhance the firms' innovation capabilities. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, this study examined the role of entrepreneurial leadership in promoting product and process innovation through the mediating effect of innovation strategy and the moderating effect of knowledge acquisition.

Data were collected through a time-lagged (two waves, two months apart) survey from 137 managers and 322 employees working in 103 Vietnamese hotels. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed hypotheses in our conceptual model.

The findings revealed that entrepreneurial leadership is positively associated with both product and process innovation. In addition, these relationships are mediated by innovation strategy. While the relationship between innovation strategy and product innovation is moderated by knowledge acquisition, evidence was not obtained for the moderation effect of knowledge acquisition on the link between innovation strategy and process innovation.

The findings advance innovation and leadership literature by identifying the roles of entrepreneurial leaders in managing an organization as a dynamic system and developing appropriate innovation strategy to adapt to rapidly changing environments. In addition, this study offers important implications for hospitality firms that are investing in innovation activities and are seeking ways to promote the firms' innovation of products and processes.

This study aims to investigate the effects of entrepreneurial leadership on service innovation in the hospitality industry and examine the mediating effects of market-sensing capability and knowledge acquisition. Additionally, the study explores the moderating role of competitive intensity in the relationships between market-sensing capability, knowledge acquisition and service innovation, drawing on the dynamic capability theory and resource dependence theory.

The data for this study were obtained from 322 employees and 137 leaders working in 103 hotels in Vietnam, using a time-lagged approach. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in SPSS Amos 28.

The results of this study reveal a significant positive association between entrepreneurial leadership and service innovation, with mediation effects observed through both knowledge acquisition and market-sensing capability. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that competitive intensity moderates the association between knowledge acquisition and service innovation.

The results of this study provide implications for hospitality firms to cultivate entrepreneurial leadership through leadership training and development programs and enhance their dynamic capabilities (i.e. market-sensing capability and knowledge acquisition) to allow them to survive and develop in a competitive market.

This study advances entrepreneurial leadership research in the hospitality context by identifying mediating and moderating mechanisms that translate entrepreneurial leadership into hospitality firms’ service innovation.

Employee’s service innovative behavior lays the groundwork for bottom-up innovation and ongoing service improvement in service firms. Therefore, it is vital for service organizations to understand the antecedents of employees service innovative behavior. Drawing upon the social cognitive theory, this study aims to develop a research model that examines the effects of ethical and entrepreneurial leadership on service innovative behavior.

Data were collected from 178 managers and 415 employees working in 178 small- and medium-sized (SME) hotels in Vietnam.

The findings showed that ethical leadership has direct and indirect effects on service innovative behavior, while entrepreneurial leadership only influences service innovative behavior via intrinsic motivation. In addition, trust in leader moderates the effect of intrinsic motivation on service innovative behavior

The study advances current scholarly research on leadership by combining the two areas of entrepreneurial and ethical leadership into one theoretical model and examines how these leadership styles generate hospitality employees’ service innovative behavior through the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation and the moderating effect of trust in leader.

The findings of this research offer significant implications for SME hotels and their managers. In their recruitment processes, hotels should search for particular personality traits, which have been found to predict ethical and entrepreneurial leadership. Hospitality firms also need to encourage communication between leaders and co-workers to enhance employees’ intrinsic motivation.

There are calls for research to examine whether both entrepreneurial and ethical leadership styles can be integrated to enhance employees’ positive outcomes. Evidence about the mechanism linking entrepreneurial and ethical leadership to service innovative behavior is limited. With this stated, the current study makes significant contribution to leadership and innovation literature by filling in these voids.

This study aims to explore the mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning orientation in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intentions of university students in Vietnam.

The data were collected from an online survey of 1,021 university students in Vietnam. The authors conducted a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that entrepreneurship education positively affects entrepreneurial intentions, and this relationship is mediated by both learning orientation and self-efficacy.

This study confirms the importance of entrepreneurship education in encouraging university students' entrepreneurial intentions.

This study offers practical implications for universities and policy makers.

This study is one of the first to empirically examine the concept of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intentions in an Asia-Pacific context.

This study emphasises the significance of entrepreneurship education and its effects on university students' entrepreneurial intentions. Furthermore, the findings confirm that self-efficacy and learning orientation play an important part in explaining how entrepreneurship education relates to entrepreneurial intentions.

Innovation is ever more critical for sustainable business performance in the contemporary, global economic and social context. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are arguably well positioned to innovate through their potential for rapid adjustment. Although leadership and organizational climate have been identified as playing a key role in innovation, little is known about whether such influences play out in SMEs. The aim of this study is to explore how leaders shape the organizational climate of their firms to enhance innovation.

The article presents findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 CEOs of SMEs in the Vietnamese tourism sector.

The findings indicate that SME leaders in the tourism sector influenced an organizational climate that provided for autonomy and supported innovation through a number of leadership approaches. They also used daily interaction-based practices to drive the innovative behaviors of employees and developed reward systems to encourage innovation in their organizations.

This study explored leaders' approaches toward developing an organizational climate to stimulate innovation in tourism SMEs. Where leaders share frequent communication and knowledge with their subordinates, they perceive a climate for innovation developments, which stimulates innovation in tourism SMEs.

The study provides implications for managers to improve creativity and innovation in firms through the development of reward and incentive systems along with leadership and team development programs.

This study describes how different leader approaches affect innovation through orientating the organizational climate and business processes within their firms toward encouraging staff to initiate and try out new ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of empowering leadership, directive leadership and initiating structure on innovation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and examine the mediating role of climate for innovation on those relationships.

Applying structural equation modeling, the study empirically tested the model on a sample of 330 employees from tourism SMEs in Vietnam.

Results indicated that climate for innovation mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and innovation and also initiating structure and innovation. Whereas empowering leadership was found to have a negative direct influence on innovation, directive leadership was unrelated to innovation.

The results of this study contribute to the literature by expanding the existing research on SME innovation, assessing the effect of diverse leadership styles and a climate for innovation on the innovation performance of SMEs. The findings enrich the literature by indicating the contribution of empowering leadership, directive leadership and initiating structure on encouraging innovation in SMEs.

When leading subordinates in the SME context, leaders who have a clear understanding of the effect of empowerment, direction and initiating structure can optimally seek to stimulate innovation. These leadership approaches influence employees’ task, interpersonal and role-related processes that shape a climate for innovation.

The novelty of this paper is that it examines the differential influences of empowering leadership, directive leadership and initiating structure on innovation and the mediating role of climate for innovation on these relationships.

In response to COVID-19 global outbreaks, Canada, and Australia, two favored destinations by international students, as the contexts of this essay, have enacted different international education policies, which will be investigated through the narratives. The authors discuss transnationality and mobility as key terms in the internationalization of higher education (HE) studies through their experiences as three Vietnamese doctoral students in Canada and Australia. Transnationality is attended through a narrative of a Vietnamese returnee struggling with bringing unfamiliar knowledge of gender and sex education from the West into a Vietnamese HE context. Mobility is unpacked through stories of a Vietnamese doctoral student in Canada stuck in Vietnam due to the COVID-19 despite inviting policies from the Canadian government to international students. This experience is connected to another Vietnamese student’s experience in Australia about a controversial act to discourage international students from staying in Australia if they cannot support themselves during the pandemic. The authors’ stories are created and retold personally for introspective and contemplative reflections on what the authors have experienced and offer considerations for how transnationality and mobility in international and comparative education could be understood through education, equity, and inclusion.

Since the 1986 initiation of Vietnam’s Đổi Mới economic policies designed to increase national Gross Domestic Product and increase international market competitiveness, the country has undergone drastic changes in infrastructure, industrialization levels, market practices and standards of living. These changes are creating an abundance of unprecedented transformations among the many ethnic minority groups, who are used as a source of tourism revenue due to their unique cultural customs, clothing, and languages that differ from Vietnam’s majority ethnic group, the Kinh. Yet, while these groups are being exoticized for their rich cultural history and practices, they are simultaneously being required to discard many traditional livelihood methods and practices in order to keep up with the swiftly changing economy and social space. Despite these ethnic minority communities being presented as the main attraction in many areas, unequal economic and social distribution compared to areas mainly composed of Kinh can be seen. Similar findings have been discovered across other ethnically diverse areas of the country. Despite flourishing tourism to the region and steady rates of regional growth in gross domestic product, a gender analysis reveals the inequalities that undergird the system. This chapter confirms the impact of tourism on development when gender is not mainstreamed into development planning and implementation.