Abstract

Purpose - In hotel business, how to build the relationship between leader and employees is very important, because it affects on the customer satisfaction. Thus, this research examines the effect of authentic leadership on job performance in the context of hotel industry and identifies mediating roles of organizational engagement, job satisfaction, and creativity in the relationship between authentic leadership and job performance. This study suggests the guidelines for how hotel companies should improve employee productivity and build a desirable organizational culture by presenting employee attitudes and behavioral models that explain the relationship between leaders and employees. Research design, data, and methodology - This study examines the structural relationship between authentic leadership, organizational engagement, job satisfaction, creativity, and job performance from the employee's perspective. Authentic leadership divide into four sub-dimensions such as self-awareness, balanced process of informations, internalized moral perspective, and relational transparency. In order to test the purposes of this study, research model and hypotheses were developed. All constructs were measured with multiple items developed and tested in the previous studies. The data were collected from 114 franchise hotel employees and were analyzed using SPSS 21.0 and Smart PLS 3.0. program. Result - The results of this study are as follows. First, authentic leadership have significant impacts on organizational engagement and creativity, but does not have impact on job satisfaction directly. Second, organizational engagement have significant impacts on job satisfaction and job performance, but does not have impact on creativity directly. Third, job satisfaction has significant impact on creativity, but does not have impact on job performance. Fourth, creativity has significant impact on job performance. Conclusions - The findings of this study indicate that hotel leaders should properly implement the authentic leadership and consider how to build a corporate culture to improve an organizational and employee productivity through authentic leadership. Due to the nature of the hotel industry, which relies heavily on human resources, hotel companies must manage their employees with authenticity in order to increase organizational engagement, job satisfaction, and creativity that affect hotel and employee productivity. If hotel employees perceive their leader's authentic leadership, they show more organizational engagement that increases creativity and leads to job performance. Finally, hotel employees can propose creative ideas only if they will be satisfied with their jobs. Therefore, the leader should develop non-monetary or monetary reward system for the employees and, make an efforts to foster creativity of the employees.