Participative leadership and its impact on employee innovative behavior through employee voice in tourism SMEs: The moderating role of job autonomy

This paper investigates how participative leadership and employee voice behavior stimulate innovative behavior, through the moderating role of job autonomy within the SMEs context. Responses from 547 frontline employees at Egyptian travel agents were collected. Using variance-based structural equation modeling (VB-SEM), the results revealed that participative leadership significantly influenced both employees’ voice behavior and their innovative behavior. The findings also indicated that employee voice behavior has an intervening role between participative leadership and workers’ innovative behavior in travel agents. In addition, participative leadership has higher effects on both employee voice behavior and employee innovative behavior with high levels of job autonomy. Finally, employee voice behavior exercises a stronger effect on the innovation of travel agents’ employees with greater levels of job autonomy. Besides theoretical contributions, managerial implications for tourism SMEs managers and practitioners, limitations, and further research directions were all presented.