Transformational Leadership And Organizational Citizenship Behavior

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Nowadays, there is a democratic approach by management professionals in which leadership, decision-making, and authority are shared in the organization. The concept of this new approach is through transformational leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1993), psychological empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995) and organizational citizenship behavior (Organ, 1990). This organizational behavior provides managers with the knowledge in understanding and employees behavior for eliciting cooperation from them in order to achieve organization’s objective. OCB is proven empirically to increase organizational functioning and organizational citizenship behavior (Jim et al., 2013). OCB refers to several forms of cooperation and helpfulness to

The service sector has been a major contributor to the growth and development of the Malaysian Economy (Performance of Service Sector in Malaysia, 2017). Malaysia has become one of the top 10 tourist destinations. Malaysia ranked the third in Asia and in the Pacific region, after China and Hong Kong, by The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in the year of 2014. Malaysia also depends on its diversified cultural or natural heritage sites and entertainment infrastructure to attract considerable leisure market. According to the Malaysia Tourism Transformation Plan, that has attracted 36 million tourists to Malaysia, they will be generating RM 168 billion for the country by the year of 2020. The development of the tourism sector had contributed greatly to the diversification of the economy of Malaysia. Malaysia’s tourism sector is expected to remain robust with a competitive and challenging environment. Hence, they need to compete among the local and international hotels in Malaysia. The tourism industry is under the service industry whereby the performance is evaluated based on the number of customers they are able to retain. This can be achieved by providing superior customer service. Hence, the employees of the organization play a major role in achieving

In particular, one of the Entry Point Project targets the improvement of the rate, mix and quality of hotels in Malaysia. This can be achieved by increasing the number of 4-star and 5-star hotels in Malaysia, which is in line with Malaysia’s focus on targeting high-yield tourists. Indirectly, the international arrivals are also increasing by each year from 2010 to 2016 but in the year 2015, the sector dropped because of the flash flood issues in several parts of Malaysia and also the increase in tourism competitiveness of other regional countries such as Japan and South Korea. Domestic tourism is also an important component of Malaysia tourism with nearly 90% of the domestic trips meant for leisure purposes. The top four destinations for domestic travelers are the states of Pahang, Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak and Sabah. However, 49.7 percent are from domestic hotel guests accommodated from other states (Malaysia Tourism Office). The growth in domestic tourism is not limited to the four destinations, but also other states like Selangor. This shows a growth for Malaysian tourism and may be an attributable effort for a better promotional activities and upgrading in terms of transportation and tourism