Is “Responsible Leadership” A Pathway Toward Improving Performance Among Micro and Small Restaurants with Innovative or Bureaucratic Organizational Cultures?

ABSTRACT

In recent years, responsible leadership (RL) practices have become more common across all types of businesses and in those associated with tourism in particular, characterized by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) and where dependence on the leader is even greater. But this style of leadership needs further theoretical development. One way to advance in this theoretical development is to demonstrate empirically the outcomes of RL. This leadership style goes beyond the leader-employee relationship, impacting all stakeholders and, therefore, interacting with the organizational identity. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to analyze the effect of RL practices on business performance in the restaurant sector, where many companies are micro or small, taking into account the moderating effect of organizational culture (OC). The study is conducted on a sample of 141 MSE restaurants in tourist areas of Spain, with the owner or general manager being the key informant. The results show that RL practices contribute to the improvement of both financial and innovation performance among such businesses. This effect is even greater when the restaurant develops an innovative OC. These results show that the impact of RL on business performance is higher in innovative organizations, linking the theoretical developments around RL and OC.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible leadership
• societal orientation
• environmental orientation
• stakeholder involvement
• organizational culture
• business performance
• restaurant sector

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Spanish State Research Agency for their financial support to conduct our research (Grant PID2019-110941RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and to the Chair in Tourism Management, Employment and Development (University of Granada and Junta de Andalucía).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

Data will be available upon request.

Ethical Approval

This research obtained the ethical approval from the Research Ethics Review Committee, Faculty of Tourism and Hotels, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt; serial number AU01502R28/9/5/2024.

Notes

1. https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/industry-statistics/national-statistics/.

Additional information

Funding

1. Spanish State Research Agency (doi: 10.13039/501100011033). Project reference: PID2019-110941RB-I00. 2. Chair of Tourism, Management, Employment and Development (Junta de Andalucía; University of Granada, Spain).