Understanding leadership styles and effects in hospitality: A co-word analysis

Abstract

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis to provide a complete and comparative study of leadership styles in hospitality literature published in recent decades. Two curated databases (Web of Science and Scopus) were chosen and combined to perform a co-word analysis to detect the main themes related to leadership in hospitality. This method analyzes the co-occurrence of topics in documents. The analysis yielded seven thematic clusters. Transformational and servant leadership and abusive supervision are the most widely researched leadership styles in hospitality and are associated with employee outcomes such as job, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and commitment. Employee outcomes such as creativity and innovation seem to be receiving research attention. This review reveals a need to focus research on underexplored styles such as paradoxical, spiritual, or responsible leadership.