Leadership Styles: Navigating through the Dynamics of Influence

Leadership has fascinated thinkers, managers, and researchers for nearly a century, and the tourism and hospitality industry is no exception. From a hotel general manager rallying staff during peak season to a tour operator coordinating multi-city itineraries, the way a leader influences others shapes outcomes far more than any policy manual ever could. To understand modern leadership styles, it helps to look back at the studies that defined them, and then connect those ideas to the people-driven realities of tourism today.

Why leadership styles matter in tourism 🔗

Tourism runs on human interaction. Front-desk associates, chefs, drivers, guides, and housekeeping teams deliver the guest experience every single day. A leader’s approach directly affects service quality, employee retention, and guest satisfaction. The classical leadership studies of the 20th century gave us a vocabulary to describe these approaches, helping managers identify which style fits which situation.

Before any one style is judged “right” or “wrong”, it is worth remembering that effective leadership is rarely a single behaviour. It is a blend shaped by people, tasks, and circumstances. The studies discussed below all point in this direction.

The Hawthorne Studies: discovering the human side of work 🔗

The Hawthorne Studies were conducted between 1924 and 1932 at the Western Electric plant in Cicero, Illinois. Initially the researchers wanted to see whether changes in lighting affected productivity, but the results pointed somewhere unexpected – the attention workers received mattered more than the physical conditions themselves. This phenomenon eventually became known as the Hawthorne Effect.

Harvard professor Elton Mayo joined the project in 1927 and broadened its scope. His team found that workers were highly responsive to additional attention from their managers and to the feeling that their managers genuinely cared about their work, and that social factors were as important as financial incentives.

What this means for tourism leaders 🔗

The Hawthorne research effectively launched the human relations movement in management. It told supervisors that workers are not machines; they are social beings whose performance rises when they feel seen, heard, and valued. Supervisors who allowed employees some control over their situation appeared to further increase motivation, and informal work groups were shown to have a positive effect on productivity.

For a hotel manager, this is gold. A simple act like a daily morning huddle where housekeeping staff share suggestions, or a chef praising a kitchen apprentice in front of peers, taps directly into the principles the Hawthorne Studies revealed. Recognition, belonging, and participation are not soft extras; they are productivity drivers.

Theory X and Theory Y: the assumptions behind the leader 🔗

In 1960, MIT professor Douglas McGregor published The Human Side of Enterprise. He argued that every manager carries a set of assumptions about workers, and those assumptions silently shape their leadership style. He grouped these assumptions into two contrasting models: Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X: a pessimistic view 🔗

Theory X assumes employees dislike their work, avoid responsibility, need constant direction, must be controlled or threatened to deliver results, and are motivated chiefly by rewards rather than ambition. A manager who believes this naturally leans toward an authoritarian style. Such organisations tend to have multiple levels of supervisors, centralised authority, and very little delegation.

In a tourism context, this looks like the resort manager who personally inspects every room, micromanages waiters during service, and uses strict rosters and penalties to enforce discipline. It can produce predictable execution, but engagement and creativity often suffer.

Theory Y: an optimistic view 🔗

Theory Y flips the assumptions. Work can be as natural as play, people will be self-directed and creative when committed to goals, and they will accept and even seek out responsibility under the right conditions. A Theory Y manager trusts the team, delegates meaningfully, and looks for opportunities to enrich jobs.

Picture a boutique hotel where the front-desk team is empowered to upgrade a guest’s room without checking with management, or where a tour leader is encouraged to redesign an itinerary on the fly when a temple visit gets disrupted. That is Theory Y in action.

Choosing the right view 🔗

McGregor did not insist that one theory was universally correct. He believed Theory Y described most employees more accurately, and that managers should design practices around those assumptions. In fact, McGregor saw Theory X and Theory Y not as opposite ends of one continuum but as two different continua, suggesting that real organisations may need a deliberate mix. Safety-critical kitchen operations may benefit from clearer Theory X structure, while guest experience design thrives on Theory Y autonomy.

The Iowa Leadership Studies: three classic styles 🔗

While McGregor focused on assumptions, an earlier set of studies looked directly at leader behaviour. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin identified three primary leadership styles in 1939 – authoritarian (autocratic), participative (democratic), and delegative (laissez-faire).

The original experiments, run with Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White, observed groups of ten-year-old boys engaged in arts and crafts projects under leaders trained to use each style. Researchers recorded productivity, satisfaction, and group behaviour.

What each style looks like 🔗

An autocratic leader makes all decisions and expects obedience. A democratic leader involves the group in decision-making while still guiding direction. A laissez-faire leader stays largely hands-off, leaving the group to set its own course.

Findings that surprised researchers 🔗

The studies showed that the autocratic style produced the highest productivity but was unpopular and created a poor climate, democratic leadership delivered slightly lower productivity but a far better atmosphere, and laissez-faire came out as the least productive style. When asked, nineteen out of twenty boys preferred the democratic leader, and seven out of ten even preferred the laissez-faire style over the autocratic one.

The takeaway for tourism is practical. A travel company manager who runs every meeting like a one-way briefing may achieve short-term targets but burn out the team. A leader who invites ideas from sales executives, ground operations, and customer service often gets richer solutions and a more committed team.

The Michigan Studies: employee orientation versus production orientation 🔗

In the 1950s, the University of Michigan, under social psychologist Rensis Likert, set out to identify the leadership behaviours that drove both productivity and worker satisfaction. The studies identified two broad styles – an employee orientation and a production orientation – and three critical characteristics of effective leaders: task-oriented behaviour, relationship-oriented behaviour, and participative leadership.

The two orientations 🔗

A production-oriented manager focuses on the task – schedules, output, procedures, and standards. An employee-oriented manager focuses on people – building relationships, supporting development, and creating a cohesive team.

The studies concluded that an employee orientation, combined with general rather than close supervision, led to better results overall. Tight breathing-down-the-neck supervision tended to dampen morale and limit performance.

Tourism applications 🔗

This finding has practical weight in hospitality. A restaurant manager who only counts covers and table turnover may hit short-term numbers, but a manager who also invests in waiters’ training, listens to their feedback, and trusts them to handle guest complaints is more likely to build a loyal, high-performing team. Later research at Michigan refined this further, identifying additional behaviours such as support, work facilitation, goal emphasis, and interaction facilitation as hallmarks of effective leadership.

The Ohio State Studies: balancing structure and consideration 🔗

Around the same time, researchers at the Ohio State University, led by Ralph Stogdill, were running parallel studies. They developed the Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire (LBDQ), asking subordinates to describe their leaders’ behaviour. Two clear dimensions emerged.

Initiating structure 🔗

This dimension reflects how much a leader defines roles, sets standards, organises work, and pushes for goal achievement. It corresponds closely to the production or job-centred behaviour identified by the Michigan team.

Consideration 🔗

This dimension captures the leader’s concern for the well-being of team members – listening, showing trust, treating subordinates with respect, and building warmth. It maps onto employee-centred behaviour from the Michigan studies. The similarity of the findings from two independent groups of researchers added to their credibility, and as the Ohio State researchers had done, the Michigan researchers found that any combination of the two behaviours was possible.

The two-dimensional grid 🔗

A crucial insight from Ohio State was that the two dimensions are independent. A leader can be high on both, low on both, or strong in one and weak in the other. The most effective leaders typically score high on both – clear about goals and warm with people. For a tourism manager, that translates into setting precise service standards (initiating structure) while also genuinely caring about staff welfare and guest interactions (consideration).

Think of a destination wedding planner. Without initiating structure, timelines collapse and vendors clash. Without consideration, the on-ground team feels exploited and quality drops. The best planners blend both.

Bringing it all together 🔗

Read together, these studies sketch a remarkably consistent message. Leadership is not a single trait or one fixed style; it is a deliberate combination of how a leader sees people, how they organise work, and how they involve others. The Hawthorne Studies introduced the idea that social and emotional needs matter. McGregor explained that a manager’s assumptions about employees can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lewin showed how decision-making style shapes group behaviour. The Michigan and Ohio State studies framed leadership as a balance between focus on people and focus on the task.

For anyone leading a hotel, travel agency, restaurant, airline desk, or tourism start-up, the practical advice that emerges is straightforward. Pay attention to people. Question your assumptions about them. Choose the level of structure each situation needs. And always make space for participation – the data have backed it for nearly a century.

What do you think? Which leadership style do you naturally lean toward when you are in charge of a team, and how might it change if you were leading a peak-season hotel versus a quiet boutique tour company?

References

1. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/hawthorne-studies-examine-human-productivity
2. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-organizationalbehavior/chapter/the-hawthorne-effect/
3. https://nicoletcollege.pressbooks.pub/leadershipv2/chapter/the-hawthorne-studies/
4. https://www.mindtools.com/adi3nc1/theory-x-and-theory-y/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
6. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmintrobusiness/chapter/reading-douglas-mcgregors-theory-x-and-theory-y-2/
7. https://www.mindtools.com/aieezpa/lewins-leadership-styles-framework/
8. https://www.leadershipahoy.com/the-kurt-lewin-leadership-experiments/
9. https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/leadership-skills-2/leadership-theories/item/iowa-leadership-studies
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Studies_of_Leadership
11. https://openstax.org/books/principles-management/pages/13-5-behavioral-approaches-to-leadership