From Serving Guests to Greening Hotels: Mapping a Decade of Hospitality Leadership Research

Sarah Sentika; Sri  Astuti Pratminingsih; Rivaldi Arissaputra; Ramadhi Ramadhi

doi:10.55227/ijhess.v6i2.2588

Authors

Sarah Sentika Universitas Satu
Sri Astuti Pratminingsih Widyatama University
Rivaldi Arissaputra 'Aisyiyah Bandung University
Ramadhi Ramadhi Widyatama University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55227/ijhess.v6i2.2588

Keywords:

Hospitality leadership, Bibliometric analysis, Green leadership, OpenAlex, VOSviewer

Abstract

Hospitality firms depend on frontline employees whose conduct leaders shape, yet reviews of hospitality leadership research rarely extend beyond 2021 or beyond subscription databases. This study maps how the field developed between 2016 and 2026, which themes structure it, and where its research frontier lies. We retrieved 2,581 journal articles from OpenAlex and combined a performance analysis of output, citations, authors, and countries with a keyword co-occurrence analysis of 162 keywords in VOSviewer. The results show that the corpus received 28,952 citations (11.22 per article; h-index 85). Annual output grew at a compound rate of about 25% between 2016 and 2025, and two thirds of the articles appeared from 2023 onward. The United Kingdom (42.11 citations per article), China (31.46), and Australia (30.42) recorded the highest impact among the ten most productive countries, whereas Indonesia ranked second in output (254 articles) but last in impact (0.88 citations per article). Environmentally oriented leadership accounts for four of the ten most cited articles. The keyword map forms six clusters: green, digital, and strategic leadership (54 keywords); psychological mechanisms linking positive leadership to frontline outcomes (45); leadership competencies and education (23); leadership as a human resource lever (22); careers and women in leadership (13); and classic leadership styles (5). Only the green and mechanism clusters exceed the citation average of their publication years, with normalised citations of 1.49 and 1.63. The overlay map shows a shift from servant, ethical, and transformational styles toward green, digital, and resource-based perspectives, with keywords such as digital leadership and green innovation averaging publication years of 2024 to 2025. The study closes with a theory, context, characteristics, and methodology agenda for longitudinal, multilevel, and context-sensitive work.

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