Exploring Leadership Development Practices and their Influence on Organisation Performance: A multiple-case-study approach in four-star Jordanian hotels

The current thesis explores leadership development practices and their influence on perceived organisation performance in Jordanian four-star hotels from the leaders' and employees' viewpoints in different hotel contexts. Challengers and statistics state that there is a persisting low performance in the indicated hotel segment, which undermines its contribution to the Jordanian hotel industry and the gross domestic product.. Although many factors impede performance enhancement within this category, this thesis focuses on exploring and understanding the leadership development practices and their returns on perceived organisational performance within the mentioned category. This thesis relies on qualitative methods which stem from the constructionism interpretive standpoint. A multiple-case study is conducted through which it follows the recruitment of participants (managers and employees) from different four-star hotels situated in Jordan. The thesis applied the purposive sampling method to determine its cases and employed semi-structured, open-ended, in-depth questions for interviewing the participants, while the thematic analysis approach helps to interpret the data collected. The findings showed that development practices are utilised in professional development rather than leadership development. Moreover, they are used in primitive ways with minimal influence on development and performance. Hence, there is only a capacity development dimension, which limits the progressive and organisation-success planning. Furthermore, formal training development was barely observed in the managers’ answers and was noticeable by its absence for employees’ development. Rather, only occasional external (out of the hotel) training, online training programs and face-to-face orientation were detected. Furthermore, other flaws were observed in these hotels' selection, recruitment, training and development processes. Moreover, it was noticed that employees holding “basic education” with “minimum training and knowledge” build their abilities from experience as the main enabler, thereby limiting their development process. Learning by “experience” does not present leadership development but indicates professional capacity building. Further, more personality-driven leadership was observed in the employees' perception as many believe that leadership quality stems from the inbuilt personality. Hence, the findings revealed the poor employment of those practices in the studied hotels, where they also shed light on the substantial challenges that hinder development in this area. In addition, constructs such as “learning”, “change”, or the clarity on performance measurement of the hotel and its employees were not fully observed as participants seemed unclear about the evaluation procedures and key performance criteria. Customer satisfaction was only reached in the studied hotels by customer opinions, comments or reviews, social media, relations with customers and employee and manager observations. Therefore, strategic, systematic, and scientific non-metric evaluations are not seen in the participants’ perceptions, and this fosters a need to explore the possibilities through which leadership development practices could be established and their linkage with the perceived level of increase or decrease in performance could be observed. Finally, the findings reflect the lack of recourses, both financial and non-financial, needed in order to achieve higher performance and it is clear that strategic planning is not implemented. Besides, the gaps also indicate that informants who think organisational culture is an enabler for PLDPs are not discerning its negative influence and the need to change. Accordingly, continuous professional development is needed on the organisational and individual levels. Therefore, a leadership development framework is provided for the studied hotels, followed by measures to solve the leadership development issues found in the outcome of this study, which could also usefully be transferred to other hotels in the same category.