The effects of leadership style on service quality: enrichment or depletion of innovation behaviour and job standardisation

Abstract

Quality service is a potential advantage for hotels in the competitive hotel industry; moreover, leadership style plays an important role in determining service quality. Some researchers have suggested that innovation behaviour directly affects service quality, while others contend that quality improves with greater job standardisation. These contentions are somewhat contradictory; as such, we used Hackman and Oldham's job characteristics model and W. R. Scott's institutional theory to explore the influencing route of the effect of leadership style on service quality through the enrichment or depletion processes related to the linking roles of innovation behaviour and job standardisation. A survey was conducted across 52 international tourist hotels and 52 standard hotels in Taiwan. Our findings reveal that in international tourist hotels, transformational leadership enriched service quality through innovation behaviour but depleted service quality through job standardisation; in standard hotels, transactional leadership enriched service quality through job standardisation but depleted service quality through innovation behaviour. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• service quality
• transformational and transactional leadership
• innovation behaviour
• job standardisation
• the job characteristics model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.