A study of the relationship between manager’s leadership style and organizational commitment in Taiwan’s international tourist hotels

[[abstract]]This study was aimed at analyzing the cognition and the relationship between managers’ leadership styles and employees’ organizational commitment in the operation unit of international tourist hotels. In order to meet the features of this industry, both the theories, “situational leadership” by Hersey & Blanchard and “organizational commitment” by Porter, Steers, Mowday & Boulian serve as the basis of this study. From the former theory, how subordinate managers prepare for the task becomes a situational factor. Task and relationship develop as structural sides of situational leadership. In this way, managers’ leadership styles can be sorted into the following four types: selling (persuasion), telling (command), participating and delegating (empowerment). In the latter theory, “value,” “effort,” and “retention” make up the main parts to be studied. The international tourist hotels involved in this study consisted of 58 state-qualified hotels which were evaluated and granted qualification by the government in 2004. Three hundred and thirty-one employees filled out the questionnaire. The survey instrument included: (a) leadership style inventory, (b) organizational commitment inventory, and (c) personal background data. By analyzing all the data collected, the results of this study indicate: 1.A ‘delegating’leadership style has the highest frequency of occurrences. It is followed by ‘selling’ and ‘participating’ styles.‘Telling’leadership has the lowest frequency of occurrences. 2.Employees of different ages, lengths of services, major subjects, top-level leadership styles, and the locations of the hotels will show significantly different organizational commitments. 3.The more that managers belong to the selling, participating, and delegating leadership styles, the more organizational commitment the employees have. In general, the ‘participating’ leadership attracts the most employee commitment, while the ‘telling’leadership obtains the least