Leadership orientations of professional tourist guides: the case of professional tourist guides members of association of Aydın Tourist Guides

The main aim of the research is to make contribution to the professional tourist guides not having been made research subject in the field of leadership and studies about the topic in the future by analyzing leadership dimensions within the context of "people orientation" and "task orientation" of professional tourist guides forming significant part of tourism. Questionnaire technique has been used as the technique of data collection in the research. The questionnaires were conducted to 431 professional tourist guides working actively and being members of Association of Aydın Tourist Guides as of 2014 February. Without sampling, all the professional tourist guides in the universe were tried to be reached. The questionnaires were filled out by means of face to face and online. The data collected were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, independent samples test and one-way Anova. As a result of the research, it has been determined that leadership dimension of "task orientation" of the professional tourist guides was higher than leadership dimension of "people orientation". Furthermore, it has been found out that there were not significant differences between all the demographical characteristics of the professional tourist guides except for "working in the travel agency" and the leadership dimensions of "people orientation" and "task orientation".