article · Tourism Review
Servant leadership in tourism businesses positively influences employee outcomes, including person-job fit, work-life balance, work engagement, innovative work behaviour, and job crafting. An evaluation of survey data gathered from 942 travel agencies in Egypt demonstrates that leaders who prioritise serving their staff foster an environment where employees proactively adapt their tasks and align better with their roles. In turn, job crafting directly enhances work-life balance, engagement, and innovation in the workplace. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that job crafting and person-job fit act as partial mediators connecting servant leadership to improved work-life balance. Additionally, employee work engagement partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership practices and innovative behaviours. These findings demonstrate how leadership style directly and indirectly shapes workforce well-being and creative contributions within the tourism sector.
Tourism enterprises rely heavily on employee engagement and innovation to remain competitive. Understanding how leadership styles affect staff well-being and proactive behaviour helps organisations address workforce challenges. Demonstrating that servant leadership enhances work-life balance and creative problem solving provides actionable insights for human resource management and organisational design within service-driven industries.
This research provides applied insights that corporate training providers, leadership coaches, and tourism human resource departments can adopt. The empirical findings can directly inform managerial training programmes, workforce performance toolkits, and leadership evaluation metrics for travel companies. Because the research is an applied empirical study rather than a technological product, its primary path to adoption lies in consultancy services and internal human resource interventions.
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Purpose This paper aims at explore the intervening role of servant leadership in tourism businesses' outcomes, in the context of travel agencies. Drawing on servant leadership theory, the authors develop a multimediation model exploring the relationships between servant leadership and person–job fit, work–life balance, work engagement, innovative work behavior and job crafting. Design/methodology/approach Using SmartPLS3, data collected from 942 travel agencies operating in Egypt, a questionnaire was used to obtain data on how travel agency employees envisage their organization’s adoption of servant leadership, person–job fit, job crafting, work–life balance, work engagement and innovative work behavior. Findings The authors show that servant leadership correlates positively with person–job fit, work–life balance, work engagement, innovative work behavior and job crafting, while job crafting correlates positively with work–life balance, work engagement and innovative work behaviors. The partial mediating roles of both job crafting and person–job fit in the link between servant leadership and work–life balance, and the partial mediating role of work engagement in the link between servant leadership and innovative work behaviors. Originality/value Up to date, research on the effects of servant leadership on person–job fit, job crafting, work–life balance, work engagement and innovative work behavior has been inadequate. In terms of contextual applicability, an empirical investigation of the relationship between these factors in travel agencies is not available. By empirically examining these relationships in the context of Egyptian travel agencies, the current study has bridged a gap in the tourism and hospitality literature, human resources management and organizational behavior literature.
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DOI: 10.1108/tr-11-2022-0538
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