Authentic leadership and happiness at work: A research in hotel businesses

Nowadays, the moral dimension of the leaders behavior is quite investigated. Because the problems in the business world mainly emerged from the failure of the leaders to behave in accordance with their values. According to this situation, understanding of the moral dimension of the behavior of the leaders have to be examined. The process of researches has shown that the moral aspect of the business be in the need for strong and sincere leaders. Also, researchers are mentioned that the importance of the emotional status of the employees, who perform the most important added value of the service provision process, is increasing day by day. Considering all these situations of the business sector, the relationship between authentic leadership and workplace happiness concept has been investigated in this thesis. Purpose of the thesis study; to reveal the effect of authentic leadership perception on the happiness at work. The thesis consists of three parts. In the first chapter; the theoretical framework of the leadership concepts are discussed. First of all, the structure of the leadership concepts, historical development and theories, of them the theoretical structure and development process of authentic leadership thought are discussed. In the second part; the concept of happiness at work is examined. Happiness; conceptual structure, emphasis on the relationship with other scientific disciplines, the components that creates happiness at work are discussed. In the third chapter which is the last part of the thesis study; in order to reveal the relationship between authentic leadership and happiness at work, field survey conducted with the personel working in the five-star hotels in the province of Ankara. According to the results of the field survey; it was revealed that the employees perception of authentic leadership positively affected the at happiness at work. The results of the study determined that there is a relationship between the authentic leadership and the sub-dimensions of the employees and the workplace happiness. Authentic leadership and its sub-dimensions have a positive effect on the workplace happiness. In addition to this, the participants' perceptions of authentic leadership were examined in terms of demographic variables, also it was observed that the perception of authentic leadership did not give statistically significant findings according to gender, marital status, age and experience in tourism sector.