How can hospitality leaders inspire team prosocial behaviors? A resource-centric perspective
基于社会交换和资源保存理论，研究酒店领导者如何通过获取关系性和职位性资源，投资于团队以激发集体亲社会行为，并发现低层领导者更依赖关系资源。
Leadership is a key catalyst for employee prosocial behaviors in the hospitality sector. However, significant gaps persist in the extant literature: (1) limited attention paid to how leaders access resources to invest in employees; (2) a heavy focus on prosocial behaviors at the individual level, overlooking their collective manifestation at the team level; and (3) limited understanding of the dynamic interplay among key determinants of leaders' resource access. Grounded on two resource-centric theories, Social Exchange Theory and Conservation of Resources Theory, this study advances three corresponding contributions. Using a time-lagged design with data collected from 125 customer service teams (485 employees; 125 leaders) at a major U.S. hotel chain, we find that leaders draw on two distinct sources: leader-leader exchange (a relational determinant of resource access) and managerial rank (a positional determinant of resource access). These are subsequently invested in teams through the development of high-quality leader-team exchange, which encourages teams to reciprocate through collective prosocial behaviors. Moreover, managerial rank serves as a key boundary condition: the indirect effect of leader-leader exchange on team prosocial behaviors is stronger for lower-ranked leaders, who tend to rely more on relational resources to compensate for limited formal authority. Collectively, these findings enrich hospitality leadership scholarship by demonstrating leader resource investment in teams as a theoretically distinct and complementary explanatory mechanism of influencing team prosocial behavior. Valuable practical implications are thus proposed.