Responsible leadership and job embeddedness in hospitality: The role of managers’ light-triad personality and employees’ prosocial identity

Abstract

Responsible leaders demonstrate their concern and accountability to diverse groups of stakeholders. This emerging leadership style is relevant to and necessary in the hospitality industry, as hospitality organizations face increasing complexity in stakeholders’ demands. Despite this complexity, little is known about responsible leadership’s antecedents and consequences for hotel workers. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we explore whether the trait of light-triad personality is related to responsible leadership, based on employees’ perceptions of their leaders’ behavior. The findings also demonstrate the relationship between managers’ responsible leadership and employees’ job embeddedness, and confirm company prosocial identity as a boundary condition in that relationship. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the theoretical model, using 407 hotel workers’ responses collected in Turkey. The findings confirm all proposed relationships. This study makes important theoretical contributions and has implications for the hotel context.