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This study aims to examine the scientific publications related to leadership research in hospitality from 2000 to 2021 by conducting a systematic review (qualitative) and to discuss implications for future research.

For the qualitative approach, the authors conduct an in-depth critique of major leadership theories using 167 articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.

The findings show that transformational leadership, leader–member exchange and servant leadership are the most prominent leadership topics studied from 2000 to 2021, followed by abusive supervision, empowering leadership, ethical leadership and authentic leadership. A framework is presented highlighting the mediators, moderators, outcomes, sample and research designs used in each of these lines of leadership research. Moreover, 16 areas for further research are identified and discussed.

This review uncovers scholars’ general lack of regard for how the study of leadership might benefit from examining hospitality as a special and challenging context for leadership and business performance.

This study reviews and critically analyzes leadership research in hospitality using qualitative methods. Therefore, the authors believe this review is of great value to academics and practitioners because it synthesizes and analyzes the field and identifies important research opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of leadership styles in the hospitality industry. It also demonstrates theories used in hospitality leadership styles research, identifies the main outcomes and highlights gaps for future research.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the 79 articles on leadership styles in the hospitality context spanning over 13 years (2008–2020) and extends the scope in distinctive means.

This review has demonstrated that leadership styles research in hospitality has made progress in the past 13 years; however, there are conceptual and empirical overlaps among different leadership styles in hospitality. There is a lack of research on antecedents and integrating theories in studies. This review has revealed that several leadership styles have not been rigorously examined in hospitality research with their outcomes.

The search strategy used to find articles published in Web of Science about leadership styles in hospitality was restricted to title to boost the accuracy of the subsequent literature.

By following the guidance presented in this review, the authors expect to advance and maintain hospitality leadership research to provide substantive insights into the context of hospitality leadership over the coming years.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to undertake a comprehensive understanding of various leadership styles in the hospitality context. This study provides a comprehensive projected research agenda to demonstrate theoretical discourses and empirical research. Overall, this critical review presents a holistic idea of the focus of the prior studies and what should be highlighted in future studies.

This study aims to investigate the intellectual structure of leadership research in the hospitality industry through citation, co-citation and heat map analysis.

Systematic bibliometric mapping was done using citation and co-citation analysis. This study covered journals from 1985 to 2020.

After reviewing 172 published articles with 10,276 citations, results identified five main clusters.

Hospitality managers can choose certain qualities (i.e. charisma, individualized consideration) or use servant leadership characteristics (i.e. selflessness) to direct employees toward more discretionary behavior.

Former holistic studies on leadership applied different approaches, such as review studies (i.e. systematic review and meta-analysis) or evaluative studies (e.g. productivity measures). It mainly focused on extending the understanding of different leadership types in tourism and hospitality. Nevertheless, relational studies (e.g. citation analysis, bibliographic analysis) remained untouched.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive, structured, objective bibliometric review of the main leadership styles investigated in the hospitality industry from 1977 to 2021 (September) and depicts this field’s conceptual structure.

Bibliometric analysis techniques such as bibliographic coupling were used using several software applications (VOSviewer, BibExcel and Pajek, among others) to identify trends and research gaps in this literature. The paper provides an overview of the evolution of research activity on different leadership styles that yields important insights into research trends, most-researched themes, main authors and key journals.

A total of 287 publications on leadership from the Web of Science and Scopus databases were summarized. The number of studies on leadership has been growing since 2013, evincing persistent interest in the topic. Eleven main streams of leadership research in the hospitality literature were detected and characterized, with transformational and servant leadership emerging as the most common approaches. Possible evolution of the topics and future research lines were also identified.

The findings can guide practitioners and scholars to further explore and implement emerging leadership styles in the hospitality sector. The paper also presents future research avenues to advance the field of leadership.

The current review provides a valuable framework for examining key leadership styles, understanding the most-researched styles and illustrating leadership's critical role in organizational and individual outcomes in hospitality businesses.

As the tourism industry emerges from full or partial closure caused by the COVID-19 crisis, it is imperative to understand the internal conditions that assisted organizations to maintain positive employee attitudes despite the adverse effects of unpopular cost–retrenchment strategies. Therefore, this study aims to understand the impacts of transformational leadership (TFL), human resource management (HRM) crisis cost–retrenchment and ethical climate (EC) on employee job outcomes affected by COVID-19 pandemic.

Mid-level managers of service organizations from a travel destination heavily reliant on the tourism participated in an online self-administered survey one month after the state eased its COVID-19 travel restrictions. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) examined how TFL and EC influenced cost–retrenchment crisis–management HRM, satisfaction and trust in the organization, followed by PLS multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) to understand differences between hospitality and non-hospitality employees.

Results revealed an overall positive effect of TFL that diminished the negative affect of HRM cost-retrenchment on employee satisfaction. PLS-MGA showed a significant positive role of other-focused EC on employee outcomes, especially for hospitality organizations, whereas self-focused EC had a negative impact for non-hospitality firms.

This study contributes to contingency theory of leadership by demonstrating that TFL in combination with EC mitigates or overpowers the negative effects of cost–retrenchment crisis management strategies on employees. The study advances knowledge of self-focused and other-focused moral reasoning climate impacts under COVID-19 conditions for hospitality organizations. The industry comparison results highlight the important positive characteristics of hospitality crisis management.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of servant leadership on hospitality employees’ proactive customer service performance (PCSP) by focusing on the sequential mediating roles of harmonious passion and customer orientation and the moderating role of others’ approval of contingent self-esteem.

This study uses structural equation modeling with the four-wave data collected from eight Chinese hotels.

This study finds that servant leadership can promote hospitality employees’ PCSP by sequentially boosting their harmonious passion for work and customer orientation. Moreover, others’ approval of contingent self-esteem strengthens servant leadership’s effect on harmonious passion for work.

First, this study extends the servant leadership research by extending its outcome to hospitality employees’ PCSP. Second, this study enriches the understanding of the mediating mechanism between servant leadership and PCSP. Third, this study advances the research on servant leadership by identifying the moderating effect of employees’ others’ approval of contingent self-esteem between servant leadership and harmonious passion.

The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, it systematically reviews and synthesizes research on servant leadership in management and hospitality management literature. Second, by reviewing and comparing the characteristics of the hospitality industry and servant leadership attributes, this study provides insights concerning the conceptualizations and theorization of servant leadership in hospitality management and discusses future research directions.

The current study reviewed 106 articles published during the period of 1970 to 2018 in hospitality management and broader management literature.

The characteristics of the hospitality industry and servant leadership attributes were found to be mutually inclusive, both consisting qualities such as trust, integrity, honesty, care, servant behavior, listening and community focus.

Scholars should concentrate on exploring what makes servant leaders unique in the hospitality industry.

The study reviews the hospitality characteristics, and servant leadership attributes offer new research avenues.

The COVID-19 crisis has affected almost all the global sectors. The hotel industry, however, was hit hardest challenging the leadership. This study, therefore, attempts to explore the challenges hospitality leadership in India face to navigate the crisis. The study additionally addresses how leaders manage the expectations of key stakeholders; communicate hard decisions with employees, pursue strategies for revival and explores the role of technology to survive the crisis.

The study adopts a qualitative approach involving structured interviews with 16 senior hospitality leaders consisting of CEO, vice president, general managers, directors, entrepreneur and general managers from various organisations like hotels, restaurant chains, food services and facilities management services. Data were content analysed involving coding techniques.

The leadership challenges included making customers and employees feel safe, optimising operations, agility and resilience of leaders, maintaining a balance between stakeholders, managing employee stress and ensuring cash reserves. The study found that leaders manage the expectation of various stakeholders by maintaining balance, demonstrating empathy and agility. The hard decisions are communicated with the employees through involvement, empathy and alleviating stress.

The study contributes by identifying twelve themes from the participants' responses under five major themes-labelled as leadership challenges, managing stakeholders, communicating with the employees, the role of technology and best practices of surviving the crisis. Future research can be conducted on such sub-themes in different countries.

As the tourism industry in India is recovering after the second wave, the governments along with all stakeholders, must launch special events for promoting the tourism sector. Safety measures like making vaccination certificates for all tourists and employees of the tourism sector should be made mandatory. Further, special certification following the COVID-19 protocol needs to be introduced for hotels and catering establishments. A fund generated from the sector's direct tax contribution needs to be established to support the employees.

The study has several social implications. The study results can unite all industry stakeholders to shape the post-pandemic era through collaboration. Empathetic leadership can take the industry out of chaos by balancing the interests of the various stakeholders of society. The pandemic has proven that we all are vulnerable to risks and challenges; leaders have a vital role in taking proactive steps to ensure that such uncertainties do not cause unprecedented damage.

This study expanded the research on the hospitality leadership challenges in managing crises in the backdrop of the crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic. The conceptual model, variables, themes and sub-themes utilised are original contributions to the hospitality literature.

The hospitality and tourism industry is highly labor-intensive. It is constituted by a fast-paced, dynamic, unpredictable and unstable operating environment that requires an extraordinary leadership ability, and leaders may need to adopt a transformational leadership style. A plethora of theoretical and empirical studies have shown the importance of transformational leadership. However, there is still much to be learned. Meanwhile, no study to date has measured the relationship between transformational leadership, job involvement, and job satisfaction among employees in the hospitality and tourism industry in New Zealand. This study expands our understanding of transformational leadership in the specific context of hospitality and tourism.

The purpose of this study is to examine job engagement and creativity of employees in the hospitality industry of Pakistan as outcomes of empowering leadership through the mediating role of creative self-efficacy.

An electronic survey was conducted to collect data from 373 employees of food-chain restaurants in Pakistan. The data was analyzed by applying structural equation modeling (SEM) through Smart PLS 3.

Results indicated that empowering leadership has a positive association with job engagement and employee creativity in the hospitality industry. Further, creative self-efficacy has been found as mediating the relationship of empowering leadership with job engagement and employee creativity.

The study has substantial implications for the employees, managers and organizations of the hospitality industry as well as for the scholars of services industry research.