Paradoxical Leadership and Proactive Work Behavior: The Role of Psychological Safety in the Hotel Industry

This study aims to identify the influence of paradoxical leadership on proactive work behavior mediated through psychological safety in the hotel industry. This study employs survey data of five-star deluxe hotels in South Korea using convenience sampling. The number of 270 cases was used for analysis and the hypotheses were analyzed with structural equation modeling and AMOS 20. Paradoxical leadership includes five sub-variables of self-centeredness with other-centeredness (SO) distance and closeness (DC), uniformly and individualization (UI), work requirements and flexibility (RF), and decision control and autonomy (CA). The results indicate that DC, UI, and CA positively influence psychological safety. Further, RF and CA make a positive impact on proactive work. Psychological safety fully mediates the effect of DC and UI on proactive work behavior and partially mediates the effect of CA on it. The findings of this study suggest that the impact of paradoxical leadership on proactive work behavior can be strengthened when this relationship is accompanied with psychological safety and other mediation variables for the relationship need to be further investigated. This study suggests how hotel managers enhance the level of proactive work behavior by training themselves to be paradoxical leaders and making psychologically safe environment.