The mediator role of learning between leadership and employee fullfilment

Abstract

Purpose: Built upon the perspective of Total Quality Management on sport organizations, this paper seeks to provide the scarce existent literature with an alternative to the classical relationships between constructs. Specifically, we proposed a direct relationship between Visionary Leadership and Employee Fulfillment and that this relation is mediated by Organizational Learning.

Design/methodology/approach: Online questionnaire to the directors of the golf courses in Spain and Portugal which are leading countries in this tourism, segment.  The sample is composed by 132 companies.

Findings and Originality/value: Concerning the first objective, the results show a direct and significant relationship between visionary leadership and employee fulfilment. Regarding the second objective, organizational learning is identified as a partial mediator of this relationship. It means, the leader does not only influence in employees throughout organizational learning, but the leader also transfers her or his vision directly to employees.

Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of this research is common to previous studies: all participants belong to the same industry, sport tourism. That restricts the results’ generalization to other service industries.

Originality/value: On one hand, the objective which relates to two variables of the model is a first-time contribution, since the study of additional relationships to the Deming Management Model has rarely been contrasted from the perspective of TQM. On the other hand, the context in which this new relationship is contrasted, golf courses, helps to generate quality literature on sports centres as well as to increase the applicability of the TQM model to relationships among the various services.