The Mediating Effect Of Psychological Empowerment On Paternalistic Leadership And Employee Job Crafting In Hotel Industry

The traditional direction of job design is top-down,that is,the work content,responsibilities and rights of employees are drawn up by managers,which is passively accepted by employees and limits their initiative.Today,this static management style is gradually facing obsolescence.On the one hand,the external environment is dynamic and complex,which puts forward higher requirements for enterprises’ ability to cope with changes.To enhance the initiative and creativity of employees is the key to enterprise development.On the other hand,with the improvement of living conditions,people pay more and more attention to the realization of self-value in work.The previous mechanical obedience to work can no longer meet people’s spiritual needs,and they hope to create a satisfactory job.Job crafting is increasingly developing,emphasizing the change of employees’ initiative to work,which is crucial for the development of organizations and individuals.The hotel industry is facing fierce competition.Front-line employees are the key to improve customer satisfaction.Job crafting not only seeks development for the organization,but also improves personal status.It is of great practical significance to study the motivation mechanism of job crafting in hotel industry.However,the current research on job crafting in the hotel industry mainly focuses on the aftereffect of job crafting and the mediating effect of job crafting(between leadership style and employee behavior),and there is a lack of research on antecedent variables.According to the existing research,leadership style has become an important antecedent variable for job crafting.Although various leadership styles have been included in the current research,there are still deficiencies in the discussion of paternalistic leadership style widely existing in China.Therefore,this paper will study the influence of paternalistic leadership on job crafting.Previous studies have shown that paternalistic leadership has a significant impact on employees’ proactive behavior(such as organizational citizenship behavior).Therefore,this paper speculated that paternalistic leadership is related to job crafting behavior.Job crafting,as an employee’s initiative,is driven by intrinsic motivation.Current studies have confirmed that job autonomy and self-efficacy are the key factors driving job crafting.Psychological empowerment,as a form of intrinsic motivation,contains these two dimensions and must have some positive relationship with job crafting.And previous studies have shown that psychological empowerment has a mediating effect between paternalistic leadership and employees’ proactive behavior.This paper thus speculated that psychological empowerment plays a mediating role between paternalistic leadership and employees’ job crafting.This paper takes front-line employees of 10 five-star hotels in China as the research object,collects data by questionnaire survey,analyzes the data by SPSS 26.0and Amos 26.0,and conducts descriptive statistical analysis,common method deviation analysis,reliability and validity test of scale and hypothesis test in turn.Hypothesis testing was conducted by correlation,regression,and Bootstrap analysis.Hypothesis testing is to analyze and verify the influence of each dimension of paternalistic leadership and the overall paternalistic leadership on job crafting,and the mediating effect of psychological empowerment on each dimension of paternalistic leadership and the overall paternalistic leadership on job crafting.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Paternalistic leadership has a significant positive impact on employees’ job crafting as a whole.From the perspective of different dimensions,benevolent and moral leadership significantly positively affect job crafting,while authoritarian leadership has no significant effect on job crafting;(2)Paternalistic leadership has no significant influence on psychological empowerment as a whole.From the perspective of different dimensions,benevolent and authoritarian leadership significantly positively affect employees’ psychological empowerment,while moral leadership has no significant impact on psychological empowerment;(3)Psychological empowerment significantly positively affect job crafting;(4)The mediating effect of psychological empowerment only exists between the benevolent leadership dimension of paternalistic leadership and employee job crafting.Through the above research conclusions,this paper obtains the following enlightenment:(1)In order to promote employees’ job crafting behaviors,managers with paternalistic leadership styles in the hospitality industry need to more fully demonstrate benevolent and moral leadership behaviors,especially benevolent leadership behaviors: Benevolent leadership not only has a direct and significant positive impact on job crafting,but also can promote job crafting through the mediating effect of psychological empowerment;Moral leadership has a direct and significant positive effect on job crafting.(2)The results show that authoritarian leadership does not significantly affect job crafting,and does not affect job crafting through psychological empowerment.Therefore,for job crafting behavior,authoritarian leadership may lack applicability in the hotel industry and in the younger group(the group under 30 years old in this study),which needs further investigation.(3)Hotels should pay attention to employees’ psychological empowerment perception,which should not only meet employees’ needs for autonomy,competence and relationship,but also improve management measures to improve employees’ psychological empowerment,so as to generate more job crafting behaviors.This study has possible innovations in the following aspects:(1)By exploring how paternalistic leadership style affects employees’ job crafting,the research on the antecedent variables of job crafting is enriched and the research on the influence of paternalistic leadership is expanded.The possible paths of paternalistic leadership affecting job crafting are also explored.(2)Given the significant positive effect of psychological empowerment on job crafting,it may also act as the conduction mechanism between other leadership styles or other variables and job crafting.