How can promote hotel employees’ performances? Relative importance of high-performance HR practices and the moderating role of empowering leadership

Hospitality and tourism enterprises often have limited resources to invest in high-performance HR practices (HPHRP) for gaining competitive advantages. Balancing organizational effectiveness and cost requires them to strategically allocate finite resources to only certain HR practices. However, we know very little about the relative value of different dimensions of HPHRP to employees’ job performance in the service sector. Using two-wave data from hotel employees and their direct leaders, this study explores which HPHRP are relatively more important in influencing in-role and extra-role performance. The results of relative weight analyses reveal that, among several HPHRP, clear job description was relatively more important in predicting in-role performance, while employment security in driving extra-role performance. Empowering leadership was found to facilitate the positive influence of clear job description on in-role performance. The theoretical implications and guidelines for hospitality and tourism enterprises to establish effective HR systems are thus discussed.