article · Sustainability
Benevolent leadership positively influences job engagement among staff in the tourism and hospitality sector. An investigation of 320 employees across five-star hotels and top-tier travel agencies in Egypt reveals that supportive leadership practices directly improve how engaged employees feel in their work roles. Crucially, this dynamic operates partly through psychological safety and workplace friendships. When leaders display benevolence, staff members experience greater psychological safety and build stronger workplace friendships, both of which in turn foster higher levels of job engagement. Both psychological safety and workplace friendship act as mediators in this relationship. These insights demonstrate how leadership behaviours shape interpersonal dynamics and trust, offering hospitality and tourism organisations practical directions to enhance working conditions and employee engagement.
Employee engagement is critical for service quality and staff retention in the hospitality industry. Showing that benevolent leadership encourages psychological safety and workplace friendships highlights actionable leadership behaviours that organisations can adopt. By cultivating supportive supervision and interpersonal trust, managers can create healthier working environments that keep hospitality and travel workers motivated and committed.
The findings can inform leadership development programmes, human resource policies, and workplace culture interventions for hotel operators and travel agencies. As an applied empirical study tested within operational businesses, the insights provide directly applicable organisational guidance. Human resource managers and corporate trainers can translate these principles into supervisory training to improve staff engagement, though the abstract does not describe a commercial product or tool.
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This study examines how job engagement (JE) is affected by benevolent leadership (BL). This study also explores psychological safety (PS) and workplace friendship (WF) as mediators. Data were collected from employees working in Egypt’s five-star hotels and category (A) travel agencies. There were 320 valid responses that were analyzed using PLS-SEM. The findings demonstrated that there is a positive relationship between benevolent leadership and job engagement. There were positive relationships between benevolent leadership and PS/WF. The findings also revealed a positive relationship between PS/WF and job engagement. In addition, the findings revealed that psychological safety and workplace friendship mediate the relationship between BL and JE. This research contributes to the studies on BL, PS, and WF in terms of JE, specifically in the hospitality and tourism context. It also includes suggestions for enhancing the workplace environment in hotel and tourism enterprises via BL, PS, and WF.
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DOI: 10.3390/su151713245
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