The Impact of Empowering Leaders on Hotel Services Improvement; the Mediating Role of Psychological Contracts and Knowledge Sharing

The present study is a descriptive-survey study with the aim of studying the improvement of hotel performance. It tries to investigate the role of empowering leadership, the realization of psychological contracts and the knowledge sharing behavior between employees and the relationship between these variables in the Performance of hotel staff services. The statistical population of the study comprises the staff of the five-star hotels in Tehran. A sample of them was selected by available sampling method. The questionnaires of Arnold et al., Coil Shapiro and Kessler, Collins and Smith, and Liao and Chuang were used to measure empowering leadership, fulfillment of psychological contracts, knowledge sharing and service performance respectively. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling method using AMOS software. Findings of the research showed that empowering leadership has a positive and significant effect on the realization of psychological contracts as well as on the knowledge sharing behavior. It was also found that the realization of psychological contracts had a positive effect on knowledge sharing as well as on the performance of hotel staff services. In addition to confirming the effect of knowledge exchange behavior on service performance, research findings showed that knowledge sharing behavior plays a mediator role in the relationship between the fulfillment of psychological contracts and service performance. Finally, it was determined that empowering leadership through the implementation of psychological contracts also influences the behavior of knowledge sharing among employees.