Relationship between intellectual capital and organizational performance in hotel enterprises: A research on four and five star hotels in Mediterranean region

Tourism plays a vital role in Turkish economy for its contributions to employment and economic benefits. The term intellectual capital as well is gaining importance in recent years both in scientific literature and business world. That is why intellectual capital is becoming more and more important day by day for hospitality enterprises which offer human focused non-stop service. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between intellectual capital and organizational performance in 4 and 5 star hotels operating in Mediterranean region from their top managers? perspective. First of all a literature review was conducted. With the help of information gathered from domestic and international literature, the first two parts of the study was constructed after which a descriptive statistical analysis was undertaken with the help of SPSS 18.0 software on the data obtained through a structured questionnaire. Later the data was analyzed with Structured Equation Modeling which is a multivariate statistical analysis technique with LISREL 8.8 computer software. In depth relationships between intellectual capital and organizational performance were investigated with the help of constructs that build up intellectual capital. In the last part of the study, models that contain direct and mediating relationships between variables were proposed and hypothesis and models were tested.