The influence of hospitality leaders’ relational transparency on followers’ trust and deviance behaviors: Mediating role of behavioral integrity

This paper investigates the effect of leader’s relational transparency on follower organizational deviance through followers’ perception of leader’s behavioral integrity and their trust in leader. Multi-level modeling results from a multisource survey-based field-study with 24 hospitality student project teams (N = 149) show that behavioral integrity mediates the relationship between leader’s relational transparency and follower’s trust in leader. Furthermore, multi-level path analysis suggests that leader’s relational transparency, a team-level construct, exerts a cross-level effect on follower’s organizational deviance through the mediating roles of behavioral integrity and follower’s trust in leader. The study has yielded theoretical and practical implications that are useful for hospitality leaders.