Abstract
Crisis leadership has emerged as a critical yet underexplored dimension of hospitality and tourism management. The industry’s structural vulnerability to crises, including health emergencies, financial shocks, and reputational incidents, makes it an ideal context to investigate how leaders anticipate, navigate, and recover from disruption. Despite its importance, crisis leadership research has often been fragmented, focusing narrowly on reactive practices, overlooking pre- and post-phases, and rarely examining cultural and institutional influences. This thesis addresses these gaps by investigating crisis leadership as a cyclical, multi-level, and culturally embedded process, focusing on leaders and employees in the hospitality industry in the United Kingdom and China.
Rooted in a pragmatic research philosophy, the research employed a multi-study, mixed-methods design that integrated qualitative exploration with quantitative testing. A sequential logic was followed, progressing from inductive exploration to cross-cultural comparison and confirmatory analysis. Study 1 established a qualitative foundation by investigating how hospitality leaders conceptualise and enact crisis leadership across the crisis lifecycle. Study 2 extended this exploration into a cross-cultural comparative context, investigating how cultural and institutional environments shape crisis leadership practices in China and in the UK. Building on these insights, Study 3 employed a large-scale survey to investigate the effects of crisis leadership on employee outcomes, considering the mediating roles of psychological resources, leader-member exchange (LMX), and voice, as well as the moderating role of ethical leadership. Together, these studies provide depth, nuance, and generalisability, offering one of the holistic investigations of crisis leadership in the global hospitality industry.
Study 1, based on 22 in-depth interviews with senior hospitality executives in China and the UK, extends established cyclical crisis leadership frameworks by identifying eight competencies required across crisis stages in hospitality contexts, adding strategic thinking, ethical consideration, and emotional regulation to existing models. The findings extend existing frameworks by showing that crisis leadership in hospitality demands not only operational agility but also ethical navigation, strategic foresight, and emotional stewardship. Study 2, drawing on interviews with 23 executives (10 UK, 13 China), revealed stark contrasts between the two cultural and institutional contexts. In China, leaders relied heavily on hierarchical authority, government networks, and collectivist mobilisation, reflecting the iii influence of state-driven mandates and guanxi. By contrast, UK leaders emphasised decentralised decision-making, legal compliance and individualistic values. The findings highlight that while the same core competencies are present in both contexts, their enactment is culturally and institutionally contingent. This study, therefore, challenges universalist models and demonstrates that crisis leadership is best understood as a contextually embedded practice.
Study 3 quantitatively tested the mechanisms through which crisis leadership influences employee outcomes using survey data from 647 hotel employees (UK = 302, China = 345). Results showed that crisis leadership significantly enhanced employees’ psychological resources, LMX, and voice, which in turn improved job engagement. Mediation analysis indicated that psychological resources served as the primary pathway linking crisis leadership to engagement. Ethical leadership strengthened the effect of crisis leadership on psychological resources, underscoring the importance of leaders’ ethical behaviour in sustaining resilience. Multi-group analysis further revealed cultural differences, in the UK, psychological resources were more strongly linked to employee voice, whereas in China, LMX was more strongly associated with engagement in crisis situations.
Collectively, the findings of this research contribute to crisis management theory by 1) reconceptualising crisis leadership as a cyclical, competency-based process; 2) extending competency models to include strategic, ethical, and emotional dimensions; 3) embedding cultural and institutional variability into crisis frameworks; and 4) integrating multiple theoretical perspectives, including the job demands-resources model, conservation of resources theory, social exchange theory, and uncertainty reduction theory, to explain employee outcomes. Practically, the findings highlight the need for hospitality organisations to 1) institutionalise scenario-based training, 2) develop culturally adaptive leadership protocols, 3) strengthen ethical decision-making, and 4) invest in employee resilience and psychological safety.
In conclusion, this thesis provides a holistic and comparative account of crisis leadership in hospitality, demonstrating how leadership competencies, cultural contexts, and employee dynamics interact to shape organisational resilience. By integrating exploratory depth with confirmatory breadth, it advances knowledge at the intersection of crisis management, leadership, and hospitality, offering insights for theory, practice, and policy.