Abstract

Leaders play vital roles in hospitality. However, former studies made on leaders of domestic hospitality mainly verified the leadership theories developed by western scholars, without considering the potential problems possibly brought about by cultural differences. In view of this point, our study utilizes the paternalistic leadership, an indigenous leadership style in Chinese societies. This study explored the relationship between leadership behavior and member’s effectiveness, and use organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) as criteria variable. The "loyalty" was adopted as a mediator variable to inspect its mediating effect between leadership behavior and leadership effectiveness. Therefore, this study had taken 110 leaders and 220 subordinates of hospitality as the research object, finding that (1) the benevolent and moral leadership in paternalistic leadership had positive impact on subordinate's organizational citizenship behavior while authoritarian leadership had a negative impact; (2) the relationship between moral/authoritarian leadership and OCB would be mediated by loyalty. Finally, it discusses the research limitations, future direction in research and the connotation in leadership theory and management practices. 

Key words: Hospitality, paternalistic leadership, loyalty, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB).