Fostering High Performance Through Leadership And Organizational Learning: An Empirical Study Of Tourism Sector

Abstract

Today’s global business landscape has been characterized as competitive and multifaceted and organizations are seeking a modern approach to create more values for customers and achieve superior performance. This study extended prior work exploring components of leadership and developed a comprehensive framework examining how leadership and organizational learning facilitate the achievement of high organizational performance. A sequential, mixed-methods approach was used in this study. In-depth interviews are employed to explore leadership dimensions manifesting in the tourism firms. Based on these qualitative data and a review of existing literature, we designed an instrument to survey leaders in the sector. SmartPLS is applied to perform PLS-SEM statistical techniques with 638 responses from survey questionnaire. The research findings offered evidence that traits, competencies, and complexity leadership behaviors of leaders could influence organizational learning and high organizational performance. Besides, the mediating role of organizational learning enriched the content of resource-based view and knowledge-based view theories by revealing one of the mechanisms through which leadership affects high organizational performance. This study made a significant contribution to leadership, organizational learning, and high organizational performance literature by providing a comprehensive framework of the relationships among these phenomena using mixed-methods approach. This study also provided some culture-specific insights about strategies to foster high organizational performance through leadership and organizational learning in a developing country and recommended some avenues for further investigation of the three domains in the future.