The Relationship Between Paternalistic Leadership and Business Performance in Small Tourism Businesses: The Moderating Role of Affective Organizational Commitment

The economic value of small businesses, their role in the global markets and the advantages of being a small business in competition are subjects that are great interest of both practitioners and researches; and do not lose effect and importance. The performances of small business, which are managed directly by their owners, seem to be related to the success level of owner-managers. This study proposes a model that researches the relationships among the paternalistic leadership behaviors of the owner-manager of small tourism businesses (STB), the affective commitment of the employees to the organization, and business performance. Within the context of this research; data will be collected from the employees of the STB's rustling in Fethiye (Mugla, Turkey), where is an international tourism destianation; through a structured questionnaire. The frequency analysis on demographics and vocational features of the respondents and descriptive statistics will be completed through SPSS 21. In order to understand whether demographic and vocational features of the respondents effect T-Test and variance analysis will be used. Through testing the research model via structural equation model, this research attempts to reveal not only the direct effects of paternalism on affective organizational commitment and performance; but also the mediator effect of affective organizational commitment on paternalism's effect on performance. This research is expected to add in theoretically to the tourism literature in the concept of tourism development regions; through its approach on economics, entrepreneurship, small businesses, locality and management theories. In addition, it will provide the policy makers, planners, entrepreneurs and local authorities with important clues to be used in settling and managing future development strategies of destinations.