CONCEPTUAL APRROACH OF LEADERSHIP AND EMPLOYEES’ INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP

There is a need for more leadership research in the hotel industry. A reason is the better understanding of the effects and influences that manager-employee relationship can have. Further, this can improve employee performance at their work and clients would be more satisfied. Due to the emergent stage of this field of research, the leadership and employee performance relationship has a lot of potential for being investigated in the context of hotel industry. There are many types of leadership styles recommended to be used in managers’ daily hotels’ activities. The most suggested is transformational leadership. Hotel industry is part of hospitality industry and is providing different services such as accommodation, food nbeverage, entertainment. This makes hotel industry very specific and the hotel products, services unique for each of client. That’s why high standards of organizational performance, a good manager-employee relationship and a high perceived employee performance by the clients are the keys for a long and sustainable business. Leadership is important in getting people to do the right things at their job. More, it helps employee to work better, to be motivated, to strive for excellence and perform beyond expectations. The first objective of this paper is to analyze the main approaches of leadership styles applied in the context of hotel industry studies. The second objective is to explore, from a theoretical point of view, the direct and indirect relationship between leadership style and employee performance based on two mediator factors: job satisfaction and organizational commitment. These two mediators are the most used in organizational researches and have a high degree of validity. The methodology applied is based on documentary study review and critic analysis of the concepts used by the literature. The results of the conceptual paper are: the construction of the conceptual model of scientific research, new approach of the term “leadership” in hotel industry’s relations. The paper suggests a future research the operationalization of the concepts used in the conceptual model and test them through statistics methods.