Feminine vs. Masculine: Expectations of Leadership Styles in Hotels during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tourism and hospitality were among the first sectors to be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are still recovering from the crisis. In the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a package of precautionary measures taken to contain the virus brought tourist activities to a complete standstill and changed tourists’ expectations and behavioral patterns. The COVID-19 pandemic presented the ultimate test for organizational leaders, who had had no chance to prepare (themselves) for the challenges that were to come. The leaders had to face uncertainty and make decisions that impacted the companies’ future success, understood as their continued existence. This study provides an up-to-date and innovative contribution to the areas of leadership and staff turnover in the hospitality industry from the perspective of transformational leadership theory. This article explores the leadership adopted by hotel managers in Poland during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic from March to December 2020 and offers useful insights into employees’ expectations towards leaders. A mixed methods approach was applied in the study, including focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted in 35 hotels with 204 participants. The results point out that respondents preferred a feminine leadership style, at least in times of crisis, and thus statistically they most often cited “inclusivity, collaboration and empowerment”, “empathy and care”, and “transparency and communication” as desirable examples of leadership attributes. On the other hand, masculine attributes of crisis leadership, i.e., “resilience and courage” and “decisiveness and risk-taking” were indicated less frequently. An interesting result was a significant pool of responses indicating the search for various ways of adaptive leadership. This study provides a more nuanced, comprehensive assessment of the quality of staff attitudes in off-chain hotels in Poland, taking into account the impact of leadership style on staff turnover at the business unit level. The leadership lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic could possibly shed light on some key actionable attributes and skills that future leaders will need to develop to overcome (at least in the initial phases) any future crisis.