Leadership Styles and Group Dynamics in the Tourism Industry

Abstract

Leadership is one of the most discussed topics in organization management over the past 50 years. Leadership studies have showed direct relationships between leadership styles and a variety of occupational outcomes, such as job satisfaction and self-efficacy. Similarly, (Wolman, The Journal of Social Psychology 43:11–25, 1956) was one of the first researchers who identified four leadership styles that influence the dynamics of a group. Nowadays, it is commonly accepted that team leaders provide a supportive context for teams by focusing on the team’s direction, structure, and external relations (Wageman et al., The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. 41:373–398, 2005). One of the primary roles of the team leader is to set the direction for the team. This is very important because establishing a clear and engaging direction for the team is a crucial part of motivating team performance (Levi, D. (2017). Group dynamics for Teams (5th edition). Sage Publications, Inc.). Although there is an efficient amount of papers on leadership styles, there seems to be a scientific research lack on the connection between leadership styles and group dynamics. In addition, whereas there are a few papers connecting leadership and group dynamics (Barnett and McCormick, Educational Management Administration & Leadership 40:653–671, 2012; Yammarino et al., 2010), there is a significant research gap on the connection between leadership and group in the tourism industry. The aim of this paper is to examine the current literature review concerning the relationship between organizational leadership styles and group dynamics in general, as well as in tourism industry; the methodology which will be used is literature selection of papers and articles retrieved from online bibliographic databases.