Use of Leadership Practices by the Managers and Their Impact on the Job Satisfaction of Employees in the Hotel Industry

OBJECTIVE
An exploratory study to determine the differences, if any, between leadership practices used by hotel managers and the perceptions of those leadership practices by employees relative to their job satisfaction.

METHODOLOGY
The population consisted of all the managers and employees in non-gaming participating properties in the geographic area of Henderson and Las Vegas (NV) with an effective sample size of 26 managers and 294 constituents (92% response rate). In addition to the LPI (Self and Observer), participants completed the Job-in- General (Ironson et al. 1989) as a measure of job satisfaction. Nearly 70% of the respondents were female, and over 88% were 26 years or older, 50% were single, 46% had college degrees, and over 46% had been employed with the company less than one year. For the constituents, 56% were female, 32% were between the ages of 26 and 30 years, 50% were single, 31% were high school graduates, over 71% were in entry-level positions, and nearly 60% had been with the property for less than one year.

KEY FINDINGS
Managers viewed themselves as engaging in Enabling most frequently, followed in order by Modeling, Encouraging, Challenging, and Inspiring. Constituents viewed their managers engaging in these leadership practices in the same rank order. Comparisons between Self and Observer scores revealed that managers rated themselves significantly higher in Enabling and Modeling than did their constituents. None of the leadership practices scores reported by managers were significantly correlated with their Job-in-General scores, although all five leadership practices and this job satisfaction measure were significantly correlated for constituents. Multiple regression analysis indicated that the manager's leadership practices accounted for over 15% of the explained variance in job satisfaction (p < .0001), with Challenging having the highest beta value.

None of the five leadership practices were statistically significant with any of the demographic factors tested in this study for managers; and this was generally true as well for constituents. Internal reliability scores in this study for the LPI-Self ranged from .82 to .90, and ranged between .92 and .94 on the LPI-Observer.