Abstract
Charismatic leadership has been conceptualized as a signaling process whereby a leader influences followers to achieve effective management. Although there have been many studies on charismatic leadership, no scale exists to measure tour leaders’ charismatic guiding. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable charismatic-guiding scale for tour leaders, from the perspectives of both tour leaders and tour members. Through a rigorous development process, the study’s 20-item, 4-dimensional tour leaders’ charismatic-guiding scale was proven to be valid and reliable. The novel scale may function as a tool for tour leaders to measure their charismatic guiding as well as for travel agencies in their assignment of tour leaders. This study applied charismatic leadership theory to tourism, furthering knowledge of charismatic guiding in tour leaders and establishing a foundation for future theoretical development.
Introduction
The tour leader is the heart of a group package tour (GPT) (Lin, Chen, and Luo 2020). Tour leaders use their communication skills, understanding of customer needs, and demonstrations of charismatic guiding to meet customer needs and resolve any problems that may arise during the trip (Tsaur and Teng 2017). Thus, charisma is essential for tour leaders. Charisma is an individual’s display of his or her own appeal to deeply influence others (Verčič and Verčič 2011). Tour leaders must exhibit humor, effective communication skills, pleasant characteristics, and other evidence of appeal (Tsaur et al. 2014; Weiler and Black 2014). Some of these qualities are not necessary for leaders in other organizations or settings; the performance required of a tour leader is different from what is required of a leader in an organization (Teng and Chen 2019). Although studies have investigated the leadership styles of tour leaders (Lopez 1980; Tsaur and Teng 2017; Wong and Lee 2012), these studies have not specified which style induces tour members to perceive the tour leader to have charisma.
To engage tour members, receive high evaluations, and leave strong and positive service impressions, tour leaders must exhibit charismatic guiding (Tsaur et al. 2014). Charismatic guiding is important within GPTs because it enhances memorability and inspires memorable tourist experiences (Pabel and Pearce 2016; Weiler and Walker 2014). Without charismatic guiding, the relationship between tour leader and tour member may not be as strong or as positive (Tsaur et al. 2014). A poor relationship prevents the tour leader from influencing tour members’ attitudes and behaviors effectively. Charismatic leadership is a well-investigated concept (Sy, Horton, and Riggio 2018; Tuan 2020). However, the concept has yet to be defined clearly in the context of GPT tour leaders. Tour leaders work in a multifaceted and complex environment. Compared with their counterparts in an office environment, tour leaders have greater leeway to enact proactive change and create more social and job-related resources by altering their relational boundaries with other tourism stakeholders (Yen, Tsaur, and Tsai 2018). The charismatic guiding of tour leaders may differ from that of professionals in other occupations. Therefore, the scale that measures charisma and charismatic leadership in organizations (Tskhay et al. 2018; Vergauwe et al. 2017) cannot be applied fully to charismatic guiding in GPTs.
This distinction raises questions. What constructs ought to be measured to evaluate charismatic guiding within GPTs, and in what context is this leadership situated? How can these constructs be conceptualized, categorized, and measured? These questions remain unanswered in the literature, creating a significant research gap that requires investigation. Based on these unanswered questions, the purpose of this study was to contextualize charismatic guiding in tour leaders to develop scale items for measuring charismatic guiding in GPT leaders. This study expanded the concept of charismatic leadership from the field of organizational behavior and provided a charismatic-guiding scale appropriate to GPT tour leaders. Study findings offer managerial implications for service management and human resources management in the travel industry.
Literature Review
The Role of the Tour Leader
The World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (2010) defines a tour leader as one who represents the travel agency in the supervision and management of the tour, in addition to implementing the planned itinerary and providing practical information about visiting the destination area. The demands of their tasks require tour leaders to not only lead tour members but also command the attention and following of the group. Tour leaders must deliver core products and services, such as group guidance, interpretation, and communication (Heung 2008). The tourist–tour leader interaction is long and continual throughout the travel process. Tour leader performance not only affects a tour company’s image but also the tourist’s satisfaction, loyalty, and perceived service quality (Chan, Hsu, and Baum 2015; Chang 2014; Cheng et al. 2017; Huang Weiler, and Assaker 2015). The responsibilities of a tour leader are challenging and complex, as well as vital.
Poynter (1993) defined a tour leader as someone performing the roles of a guide, leader, translator, and travel manager. On multiday overseas tours, the tour leader is an important medium who undertakes management responsibility for the group, as stipulated in the GPT contract, and coordinates with travel suppliers (such as hotels, restaurants, and attractions). Cohen (1985) argued that the tour leader’s roles include instrumental, social, interactional, and communicative components. Huang, Hsu, and Chan (2010) and Chen, Hsin, and Shen (2010) argued that, in addition to the four important roles proposed by Cohen (1985), the tour leader must also perform care and emergency-handling roles. Thus, Luoh and Tsaur (2014) proposed that a tour leader must play instrumental, social, interactional, communicative, emergency, and care roles.
Charismatic Leadership
Leadership refers to the use of interpersonal influence to achieve objectives through direct communication channels (Halpin and Winer 1957). Conger et al. (1997) defined charismatic leadership as an attribution based on follower perception of the leader’s behavior. Antonakis et al. (2016) defined charismatic leadership as values-based, symbolic, and emotion-laden leader signaling. In urgent coordination challenges, charismatic leaders express their competency and willingness to adjust their teams’ actions rapidly (Grabo, Spisak, and van Vugt 2017). Studies on organizational leadership styles have conceptualized charisma as the display of a type of leadership style that influences the perception and behavior of followers (Banks et al. 2017; Sy, Horton, and Riggio 2018), thereby attracting the following of others. Charismatic leadership may be exemplified by the leaders of any group, including GPT leaders (Tsaur et al. 2014).
Burke and Brinkerhoff (1981) stated that a charismatic person is one who can be funny, stimulating, capable, persuasive, and attractive. Javidan and Waldman (2003) argued that, from the followers’ perspective, the dimensions of charismatic leadership include energy and determination, vision, challenge and encouragement, and risk-taking. The generic charisma instrument developed by Verčič and Verčič (2011) comprises six dimensions: [a leader who] attracts admiration and inspires, is communicative, is honest and reliable, is attractive, is calm and visionary, and is powerful and dominant. Tskhay et al. (2018) developed a general charisma scale comprising the two constructs of influence and affability. As reflected in these constructs, a charismatic leader can not only motivate individuals to enhance their performance but also establish group cohesion through the sharing of the leader’s vision. In the context of GPT guiding, tour leaders share their visions and goals with tour members using a unique set of characteristics, techniques, and social skills. To satisfy tour members’ needs, charismatic tour leaders are willing to take on risk and trade their personal or company’s interests to influence members’ thoughts and behavior.
Tour Leader Charisma
The tour leader is a medium between tourists and a strange environment. Cohen (1985) argued that the responsibilities of a tour leader include the delivery of information and promotion of group interactions. If itinerary-related problems occur, the tour leader must devise a solution to maintain the quality of the tour (Tsaur and Teng 2017). Because tour leaders are frontline service personnel in the tourism industry, as well as the face of the tour company (Wong and Wang 2009), scholars believe that tour leaders require characteristics such as attractiveness, keen observational skills, effective communication skills, and professional expertise (Mak, Wong, and Chang 2011; Tsaur and Teng 2017). These characteristics make for a tour leader who is better able to elevate the tour group’s mood. These characteristics are similar to the constituents of charisma proposed in previous studies (e.g., Tskhay et al. 2018; Verčič and Verčič 2011).
Tsaur et al. (2014) argued that tour leaders’ charisma is an attractive individual-level characteristic involving a person’s outward appearance, authority, communication skills, intelligence, and confidence. A study conducted by Heung (2008) on customer perceptions of tour leaders’ service quality proposed the following four constructs: performance and communication ability, professional attitude (including humor) and ability to solve problems, professional knowledge (including a professional outward appearance), and individual integrity. A tour leader’s charisma is reflected in service quality. Tour leaders use role characteristics to display their charisma and increase group-member satisfaction with the tour leader’s service. To meet the group’s need for leadership, the tour leader must display the appropriate characteristics associated with charisma.
Charismatic Guiding
Although previous studies have provided a sound conceptualization of charismatic leadership in an organizational context, the primary focus of existent studies has been on the leader–follower relationship, which differs from the service provider–customer relationship between the tour leader and members of a tour group (Wong and Lee 2012). The tour leader’s relationship is with customers and not an organization’s, or the leader’s, subordinate employees (Tsaur and Teng 2017). Although tour members require the services of the tour leader, they are also paying customers. In caring for tour members, tour leaders must both lead and serve them in order to make them happy (Wong and Lee 2012). This is the central and inherent difference between the context of a GPT and organizational contexts with respect to charismatic leadership. To clearly define the concept of charismatic guiding in tour leaders, specific factors constituting charismatic guiding in group leaders must be explored.
According to Wong and Lee (2012), tour leaders differ in their leadership styles, differentially affecting the travel experiences of tour members. Diverse travel experiences, in turn, result in varying evaluations of the tour leader (and, by implication, the travel agency) during the travel process. Tsaur and Teng (2017) proposed 12 tour-guiding styles (constantly reminding, fully prepared, humorous, empathetic, member-prioritizing, cultural-ambassador, elaborate, eloquent, quick-witted, responsible, considerate, and customer-oriented) based on the roles played by the tour leader. Among other factors, tour member preferences and needs in terms of tour-guiding styles differ by age and gender. Caber et al. (2019) discovered that, encountering conflict with tour members, professional tour guides tend to exhibit three types of conflict-management styles that are typified by the roles of mediator, young rule-maker, or tolerant expert. Tour leaders’ guiding styles are the result of their accumulated work experience (Tsaur and Teng 2017). Because travel experiences depend on leadership style, a successful leadership style promotes satisfaction and loyalty in tour members (Wong and Lee 2012). Tour leaders employ charisma to create a favorable leadership style and, resultingly, positive tour experiences.
Tour leaders’ charismatic guiding is required to increase tour members’ enjoyment of travel; tour members feel happiness, experience fun, and form deep and positive impressions. The tour leader must be attentive to the needs of tour members and create a harmonious atmosphere to ensure customer satisfaction with the trip (Tsaur and Ku 2019). In the right environment, charisma can increase the vigor and performance of followers. In the organizational behavior literature, Shamir et al. (1998) and Levay (2010) have argued that charismatic leadership is composed of the special characteristics and behavior exhibited by the leader, especially unconventional and naturally admirable abilities that the leader can use to influence followers.
Although the leadership role played by the tour leader in GPTs differs from that of a leader in an organizational context, the expression of a tour leader’s service performance and charisma is similar to the concept of charismatic leadership and charisma. Therefore, the present study adopted several charisma indexes that have been proposed in previous studies, including indexes of attractiveness and influence (Tskhay et al. 2018; Verčič and Verčič 2011). This study defined charismatic guiding as the use of special characteristics and behavior, including attractiveness, friendliness, professional expertise, and influence, by tour leaders to attract tour members and to affect tour members’ perceptions, behaviors, and values during the GPT process. Considering the limitations in the literature, the purpose of this study was to develop a charismatic guiding scale for GPT tour leaders.
Research Design
This study developed a scale to measure tour leaders’ charismatic guiding in the context of GPTs; the investigation was conducted from the perspectives of both tour leaders and tour members. This study was conducted in Taiwan. Using the multiphase data collection approach proposed by Tsaur and Teng (2017), this study collected data from tour leaders and tour members separately. Building on the literature on scale development (Churchill 1979; Wang et al. 2007), a Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale was developed. The process was composed of three steps. The first step was formulating the initial scale items. The second step involved data collection from the first sample and purification of the scale. The third step was data collection from the second sample and reanalysis of the scale. This three-step process is illustrated in Figure 1.
Flow chart demonstrating development of the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale.
According to Churchill (1979), researchers must specify the domain of each construct during the initial stage of scale development by clearly describing what is included and excluded in the definition of the construct. By reviewing the literature associated with tour leader charisma and the concept of charisma itself, this study conceptualized the charismatic guiding of tour leaders and specified its domain. Scale items were generated according to this domain.
Item Generation
Literature search
A literature review led to the compilation and summary of relevant journal articles, governmental publications, and websites. The goal was to collect relevant research on tour leader charisma and charismatic leadership (e.g., Conger and Kanungo 1994; Javidan and Waldman 2003; Tskhay et al. 2018). Preliminary items (16 items in total) for charismatic guiding in tour leaders were identified in this way.
In-depth interviews
In addition to the literature review, this study employed in-depth interviews to collect data. In-depth interviews were conducted with tour leaders and tour members to understand, and collect data on, charismatic guiding. The objective was to explore the factors that constitute charisma during the tour leader’s group-leading process, as well as to understand the perceptions of charismatic guiding held by tour members. Based on guidelines proposed by Tsaur and Teng (2017), this study chose 16 interviewees who were experienced tour leaders (≥5 years of experience in leading long and short travel tours). The respondents were recruited from the Association of Tour Managers in Taiwan and chosen based on their experience and differences in group-leading characteristics and methods. The remaining interviewees were 17 tourists who had participated in at least five group tours. They were selected based on their extensive group-travel experience, encounters with diverse types of tour leaders during their travels, and varied perceptions of tour leaders.
The in-depth interview questions were designed based on items proposed by Murphy and Ensher (2008) in their research on charismatic leadership; the word choices and semantics of each interview question were adapted to the context of GPTs. An interview manual was created. Subsequently, three tourism-industry experts were invited to review the manual and the interview questions, after which the word choices and semantics were revised to ensure that information on charismatic guiding could be acquired. The study used a semistructured, in-depth interview method and the interviews were conducted in Chinese. Before the start of the interviews, interviewees were made aware of the objectives of the study and the definition of charismatic guiding in tour leaders. To avoid affecting the interviewees excessively, the interviewer only briefly introduced the conceptual definition of tour leaders’ charismatic guiding. Interviewees were not familiar with items collected from previous studies.
The following interview questions were asked of tour leaders:
What special characteristics constitute charisma?
What are some group-leading methods and behaviors that exhibit charisma?
How do you share your group’s leading objectives with tour members?
Have you ever taken a high-risk action or sacrificed personal or company well-being to defend the well-being of tour members?
How do you establish a charismatic style that is different from that of others?
How do you lead a group well?
How do you influence tour members?
What is your philosophy of leading a group?
What group-leading skills are required to be charismatic?
The following questions were asked of tour members:
What group-leading practices, employed by tour leaders, do you consider charismatic?
What types of interactions instigated by tour leaders during the group-leading process do you consider charismatic?
In your previous experiences participating in tours, what unconventional group-leading methods employed by tour leaders do you consider charismatic?
The sample size for the in-depth interviews was determined by data saturation (Patton 2002). Specifically, the results of interviews with 16 tour leaders and 17 tour members revealed that no new insights or information on charismatic guiding could be acquired, indicating that the collected data were saturated. Therefore, interviews were completed. Among the tour-leader interviewees, nine interviewees were men and seven were women; the age range was 34–62 years, with an average age of 43.8 years; the range for work experience was 5–29 years, with an average work experience of 14 years; all 16 tour leaders were foreign-language tour leaders. Among the group-member interviewees, 6 were men and 11 were women; the age range was between 27 and 60 years, with an average age of 45.1 years; the range for group-tour experience was 5–15 group tours attended; and the travel destinations were primarily Europe, Northeast Asia, and the United States. In-depth interviews were conducted during the three-month period from September 1 to November 30, 2018. Each interview lasted 1.5–2 hours and was recorded to collect conversation data. In total, 33 participants were interviewed. After in-depth interviews, audio recordings were converted to text data for data analysis. Overall, 382 data pages were transcribed.
Content analysis
After the interview data were recovered, content analysis was used for data analysis (Kassarjian 1977). Content analysis is a commonly used qualitative method (Leung et al. 2013). Through data evaluation and categorization, researchers can ensure the quality and integrity of extracted information and sustain the validity and reality of their research (Mohammed, Guillet, and Law 2015). The unit for content analysis can be a single word (a term), theme, property, sentence, paragraph, item, or a set of symbols. Because the charismatic-guiding interview content was mostly descriptive, this study chose to use “sentence” or “paragraph” as the unit of analysis. As indicated by Kassarjian (1977) and noted above, the collected data were first converted to text. Subsequently, judges were employed to organize the content of the interview data into sentence or paragraph units and to review the data’s content validity. The four judges were a senior tour leader with more than 15 years of group-leading experience, two tourism-domain scholars, and the current study’s researcher. The interviewees’ interview contents were transcribed word by word, and transcription was assessed by the four judges. The four judges worked manually and independently during the organization and screening processes.
For example, the following text from the in-depth interview “use open mind methods to lead the group and voluntarily provide tour members with a contact number or a social community account; these methods made tour members perceive the tour leader to be accessible” was simplified into “easy to get close to” as the unit. Every item was compared with every other item to determine if descriptions were replicated or had different meanings. This process facilitated the combination and separation of items (Gable and Wolfe 1993). The judges screened any questionable units. Content analysis yielded 288 units. Subsequently, and based on the classification principles of content analysis, two tourism scholars who were familiar with content analysis categorized each analytical unit. Finally, the 288 units were classified into 49 subcategories, the preliminary items that are shown in Table 1.
Potential Indicators of Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding.
Item deleted after content validity.
Item deleted during exploratory factor analysis.
In the final stage of the content analysis, an interrater reliability test was conducted. Reliability is indicated when the ratio of coding agreement to the total number of coding decisions exceeds 80% between two raters (Kassarjian 1977). The interrater reliability of the two authors in the classification process were 0.86 (248/288) and 0.90 (43/49), respectively. These values exceeded the requisite minimum of 0.8 (Kassarjian 1977) and indicated acceptable reliability in the classification results. Therefore, the 49 initial items were deemed suitable for inclusion in a new scale that could be used as a preliminary tool for measuring charismatic guiding in tour leaders, from both the perspective of the tour leaders and the perspective of the tour members.
After the initial items were formulated, a six-member group of experts assessed the items for content validity and content relevance. The group was composed of two senior tour leaders, two tour members, and two tourism scholars. The expert group assessed each item for suitability and evaluated each operational definition, offering their opinions on how items could be better worded and on which items should be added or deleted. Each expert scored each item from 1 (extremely unsuitable) to 5 (extremely suitable). In total, 10 items that scored lower than 3 were eliminated (see Table 1). The remaining 39 items were retained as the initial items for the scale.
Data Collection (Phase 1) and Purification of Measures
Exploratory factor analysis
A 5-point Likert-type scale was used with the 39 initial items produced by the content analysis. The Likert scale that ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) was incorporated in the design of the initial questionnaire for charismatic guiding in tour leader. The first questionnaire was distributed to the tour leader participants. Questionnaires were issued over two months, from January 1 to February 28, 2019. In total, 400 questionnaires were distributed to members of the Association of Tour Managers through the association; 367 questionnaires were returned. Of the 367 questionnaires, 342 were valid, constituting a response rate of 85.5%. A description of respondents distributed by characteristics demonstrated that 53.6% were men, 55.1% were married, 29.5% were 41–50 years old, 63.3% had a university education, 25.1% had 6–10 years of tour-leading experience, 24.6% had led tours in Europe and the United States, and 21.7% had a monthly salary of US $1,321–US $1,650.
A skewness–kurtosis test was conducted to examine the normality of the collected data. The absolute values of both skewness (from −0.28 to 0.72) and kurtosis (from −1.14 to 0.63) were less than 2 (Kim 2013), indicating that the hypothesis that the data were normally distributed was not rejected. To reduce the number of items and simplify the scale, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the data from the first sample survey. In this step, the criterion for deleting items was a factor-loading value lower than 0.5 or a concurrent high factor loading value in other factors (Hair et al. 2010). EFA produced four factors with eigenvalues greater than 1, a KMO index of 0.93, a chi-square value of 5416.42, a degree of freedom of 465, and a p value <0.01, indicating statistical significance. This simplification process reduced the 39 initial items to a set of 20 items with greater explanatory power.
Next, this study referenced the description of charisma from Tskhay et al. (2018) as well as the definition and context of charismatic guiding in tour leaders to specify the factors related to charismatic guiding. For example, the dimension of friendliness reflects the tour leader’s ability to get along with anyone, make people feel comfortable, and smile at people often. Therefore, the factor named “friendliness” was composed of items related to how approachable a tour leader is and whether the guide possessed qualities such as being fun, enthusiastic, and empathetic. In total, four factors were specified: attractiveness (six items), friendliness (four items), professional expertise (five items), and influence (five items). Attractiveness refers to how appealing and pleasing the tour leader’s outward appearance and explicit character traits were to tour members. As described above, friendliness refers to the tour leader’s ability to make tour members feel comfortable. Professional expertise refers to the knowledge and ability of the tour leader relative to the completion of tasks involved in the tour-leading domain. Influence refers to the tour leader’s ability to change the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behavior of tour members during the tour-leading process.
Data Collection (Phase 2) and Reanalysis of Measures
Confirmatory factor analysis
Churchill (1979) recommended the inclusion of simplified items in a second questionnaire survey to test the simplified scale with a separate set of respondents. When tour leaders completed the survey, the measurements of charismatic guiding captured only the tour leaders’ ratings of their own charisma, behavior, and performance. The measurements are more informative for GPT management if they capture how tour members also perceive the charisma, characteristics, and behavior of the tour leaders. Therefore, to broaden the applicability of this study’s scale, the second questionnaire survey involved tour members who participated in group tours.
The second questionnaire was conducted over two months, from May 1 to June 30, 2019. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants. The surveys were distributed (and returned immediately on completion to research personnel) at the arrival halls of Taoyuan International Airport and Kaohsiung International Airport. Tourists returning from overseas group tours were targeted. This second survey round distributed 400 questionnaires and recovered 370. Of the 370 questionnaires returned, 359 were valid, for a valid response rate of 89.8%. A description of tourist respondents by characteristics demonstrated that 62.8% were women, 60.1% were married, 39.8% were 31–40 years old, 39.8% had a university education, 30.6% worked in the industrial and business sector, 44.6% had participated in fewer than five group tours, and 20.9% had a monthly salary of US$1,321–US$1,650.
A skewness–kurtosis test was conducted to examine the normality of the collected data. The study items were assessed by determining the range of skewness (−0.19 to 0.63) and kurtosis (−1.16 to 0.55); results indicated that the hypothesis that the data were normally distributed was not rejected. In this stage, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the reliability and validity of the data set obtained from the second survey, completed by tour members. The results are shown in Table 2. In the four-factor charismatic guiding model, the Cronbach’s α values for the 20 items were between 0.78 and 0.88, and the composite reliability values for the latent variables were between 0.80 and 0.88; all of these values were higher than the minimum 0.70 recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981) and Bagozzi and Yi (1988). The values indicated excellent internal consistency in the study’s scale. According to the CFA results, the index values for model fit were χ2/df = 3.82, goodness of fit index (GFI) = 0.92, adjusted goodness of fit index (AGFI) = 0.91, standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.05, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.07, non-normed fit index (NNFI) = 0.92, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.94, and incremental fit index (IFI) = 0.94. These index values were all higher than the minimum recommended by Hair et al. (2010), thus indicating the suitability of the scale as a measure (Kelloway 1998).
Confirmatory Factor Analysis Results for Sample Two (n=359).
Note: CR = composite reliability; AVE = average variance extracted; GFI = goodness of fit index; AGFI = adjusted goodness of fit index; SRMR = standardized root mean square residual; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; NNFI = non-normed fit index; CFI = comparative fit index; IFI = incremental fit index.
Convergent and discriminant validity tests were also conducted. As presented in Table 2, the average variance extracted (AVE) values for the constructs in the study model were all greater than the conventional minimum of 0.5 (Fornell and Larcker 1981), indicating convergent validity. Discriminant validity was also indicated by AVE square roots of the four constructs between 0.66 and 0.77, all greater than the correlation coefficient between the construct and other constructs (Fornell and Larcker 1981). Table 3 presents these values. The scale-development process ensured that the 4 constructs and 20 items in the newly created scale could be used as a standard questionnaire for measuring charismatic guiding in tour leaders. The scale developed by this study is referred to as the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale.
Correlations of All Constructs (n=359).
Note: Values along the diagonal (in bold) represent the square root of average variance extracted.
p<0.01.
Criterion-related validity
The study tested the criterion-related validity of the scale. Tsaur et al. (2014) determined that in a travel operator’s blog marketing, tour-leader charisma improved relationship quality (specifically with respect to satisfaction, trust, and commitment). The Tsaur et al. study showed that during group travel, tour-leader performance was positively correlated with trust. Therefore, this study chose trust as the criterion with which to verify correlation for the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale. The study used the trust scale of Setó-Pamies (2012), a scale composed of four items. The items were originally in English and were translated into traditional Chinese by this study’s author and two native English speakers from the tourism industry. Back-translation verified the accuracy of the translated text, as suggested by Van de Vijver and Hambleton (1996). Using data from the second survey, completed by GPT tourists, this study conducted an empirical validity test with respect to levels of trust. Pearson correlation analysis was used to test for the correlation between the four charismatic-guiding factors. The results are presented in Table 4. Trust and the four factors related to charismatic guiding exhibited significantly positive correlations (p < 0.01), thus indicating the outstanding predictive validity of the study’s scale.
Criterion-Related Validity Analysis (n=359).
p < 0.01.
Nomological validity
The nomological validity of the newly developed charismatic-guiding scale was verified. A previous study found that perceived charisma was positively correlated with customer response (Pauser and Wagner 2019). Accordingly, this study adopted the three-item customer satisfaction scale proposed by Oliver (1997) to examine the nomological validity of the proposed scale. The backtranslation approach proposed by Van de Vijver and Hambleton (1996) was employed. The results showed that charismatic guiding positively affected customer satisfaction (β = 0.65, p < 0.01), with 51.87% of the variance explained. These findings indicated acceptable nomological validity of the proposed charismatic guiding scale.
Short Version of the Tour Leader’s Charismatic Guiding Scale
To simplify and thus improve the practicability of this study’s scale, a short version of the scale was developed. According to the scale-truncation approach proposed by Walsh, Shiu, and Hassan (2014), this study truncated the original 20 items to 12. Specifically, the item-to-total correlation and item-to-subscale correlation values were calculated, after which items with lower scores were deleted. Ten senior tour leaders, 10 GPT tourists, and 10 tourism scholars formed a 30-member expert team. The expert team scored the items within each construct on charismatic guiding with respect to how representative the item was of the construct’s context. Scores ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). For each construct, the three items with the highest average scores were retained to form the Short Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale. The short scale contains 4 constructs and 12 items.
Subsequently, this study analyzed data from the second survey with data from 8 of the 20 items deleted. Reliability and validity tests were conducted on the short scale. Results are presented in Table 5. In the four-factor charismatic-guiding model, the Cronbach’s α values for the 12 items were between 0.70 and 0.80, and the CR values for the latent variables were between 0.76 and 0.79; all values were higher than the requisite minimum of 0.70 recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981) and Bagozzi and Yi (1988), indicating the excellent internal consistency of the short scale. For the model fitness test, the indices for model fit were χ2/df = 4.88, GFI = 0.91, AGFI = 0.90, SRMR = 0.05, RMSEA = 0.07, NNFI = 0.92, CFI = 0.93, and IFI = 0.93. These indexes were higher than the requisite minimum recommended by Hair et al. (2010), indicating the applicability of the short scale as a measure (Kelloway 1998).
Confirmatory Factor Analysis for the Short Version of the Scale (Sample 2, n=359).
Note: CR = composite reliability; AVE = average variance extracted; GFI = goodness of fit index; AGFI = adjusted goodness of fit index; SRMR = standardized root mean square residual; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; NNFI = non-normed fit index; CFI = comparative fit index; IFI = incremental fit index.
The AVE values of the constructs were all greater than the requisite minimum of 0.5 (Fornell and Larcker 1981), indicating the convergent validity of the short scale. With respect to discriminant validity, the AVE square roots of the four study constructs were between 0.71 and 0.74, all greater than the correlation coefficient between the construct and other constructs (Fornell and Larcker 1981), indicating excellent discriminant validity in the truncated scale.
This study used data on trust in an additional empirical validity test. Pearson correlation analysis was used to test for the correlation between trust and the four factors related to charismatic guiding. The results showed that the four charismatic-guiding factors were significantly and positively correlated with trust (p < 0.01), with correlation coefficients of 0.64, 0.68, 0.63, and 0.68, respectively. Additionally, charismatic guiding positively affected customer satisfaction (β = 0.68, p < 0.01), with 53.19% of the variance explained. These findings indicated the acceptable predictive validity and nomological validity of the truncated scale. The full verification process, as described, ensured that the 4 constructs and 12 items within the short scale could be used as a standard questionnaire for measuring charismatic guiding in tour leaders.
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to contextualize charismatic guiding in GPT tour leaders by developing a scale of items to measure charismatic guiding. To develop the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale, this study followed the scale development process recommended by Churchill (1979) and Wang et al. (2007). The scale was constructed in three steps. First, a literature review and in-depth interviews were conducted to formulate 49 items. Next, content analysis and expert content validation were used to establish an initial list of 39 items. Subsequently, data were collected from a first survey involving tour-leader respondents; data were analyzed using EFA to purify the scale items. The scale was then simplified into a set of four constructs and 20 items. Finally, new data were collected from a second survey completed by GPT-tourist respondents; data were subsequently analyzed using CFA to verify that the scale’s factor structure was consistent with expectations. The final scale that was established was composed of four constructs (attractiveness, friendliness, professional expertise, and influence) and 20 items; a shortened counterpart with four constructs and 12 items was also created. The scale passed internal consistency, construct validity, and empirical validity tests, thus verifying its reliability and validity.
This study conceptualized charismatic guiding in tour leaders from the perspectives of both tour leaders and tour members. An initial set of items was formulated to measure tour leader charismatic characteristics and behavior, as exhibited during the tour-leading process. Tour leaders and tour members were invited to in-depth interviews. The in-depth interviews resulted in the addition of items to the existing set. These items were part of the professional expertise construct primarily, and related to the three requisite tour leader roles (an interactional role, a communicative role, and an emergency-handling role) during the tour-leading process. The requisite professional group-leadership capabilities, including communication and coordination; the provision of professional and unique commentary; and flexible response to unexpected events, differ from leadership capabilities required in an organizational context. Previous studies concluded that leader charisma is constituted in part by attractiveness (Verčič and Verčič 2011). Similarly, in the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale developed in this study, attractiveness had the highest explanatory power among the four constructs, demonstrating that attractiveness was most important for group-tour leaders.
Although scales have been developed in the literature to measure charisma or charismatic leadership (Conger et al. 1997; Javidan and Waldman 2003; Tskhay et al. 2018), these scales are more appropriate for use in organizational or work-team contexts where the stakeholders are personnel within an organization. The natures of tour leaders and organizational leaders differ, as the subject for the tour leader is not an employee but a customer. Tour leaders also operate in a more multifaceted and complex work environment and have greater personal and social resources at their disposal (Yen, Tsaur, and Tsai 2018). The study’s new Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale was designed to contain the constructs of attractiveness, friendliness, professional expertise, and influence. The difference between this study’s scale and existent scales on charisma or charismatic leadership in the literature is what is being measured: distinct leadership requirements pertaining to tour-guiding. To ensure the comprehensiveness and applicability of the scale, the study incorporated the perspectives of both tour leaders and tour members during scale development. The long (20 items) and short (12 items) versions of the newly developed scale can be used for future surveys of both tour leaders and tour members, thus expanding the theoretical applicability of the scale.
Conclusions
Theoretical Implications
Charisma and charismatic-leadership scales in the existent literature cannot effectively measure the charismatic guiding of GPT tour leaders. This study extended the concepts of charisma and charismatic leadership in previous research (e.g., Tskhay et al. 2018; Vergauwe et al. 2017) and applied these concepts to the context of GPTs. The present study is the first to explore the construct of tour leader charismatic guiding in the context of GPTs.
In contrast to previous studies on charismatic leadership conducted in an organizational context, this study proposed Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale was designed specifically to examine the context of GPTs. Use of the scale determined that attractiveness and professional expertise are the essential constructs of the charismatic guiding performed by tour leaders. This study has contributed to the literature on charismatic leadership by elucidating tour leader charismatic guiding in GPT contexts.
Charismatic leadership is just one of various leadership styles (Tuan 2019). Although Wong and Lee (2012) and Tsaur and Teng (2017) explored leadership styles and tour-guiding styles, respectively, these studies did not specify the style type that yields greater perceived tour leader charisma among tour members. Analysis of only tour leadership style or guiding style cannot fully uncover the nature of charismatic guiding. Unlike previous studies, this study determined the concept, indexes, and dimensions of the charismatic guiding of tour leaders and developed a scale with acceptable reliability and validity. The study findings are expected to contribute to domain knowledge associated with GPT leadership styles.
A scale that measures tour leader charismatic guiding has been absent in the literature. The four-dimensional measure of this study’s new scale, the Tour Leader Charismatic Guiding Scale, provides a theoretically grounded scale that can be used by future studies to test the causes and effects of charismatic guiding in tour leaders. This study makes possible new theories on tour leader charismatic guiding.
Managerial Implications
The context of charismatic guiding and the scale constructed in this study have wide applications in travel-industry management. First, different GPTs demand varying tour-leader roles. Additionally, tour leaders must display charismatic guiding to attract tour members. Travel-industry managers can use this study’s scale to accommodate both of these needs, evaluating charismatic guiding and tour-leader type. Managers can cultivate the requisite charisma in tour leaders and assign tour leaders to direct the appropriate groups depending on group-member needs and tour-leader skills.
Second, travel-industry managers can use the scale as a reference for planning tour-leader training and managing human resources. For example, a travel agency’s courses on charismatic guiding and the agency’s formulation of development and growth plans for tour leaders can help tour leaders fulfill the different roles required by a tour leader more successfully. Tour leaders can become more suited to various GPT product types and group-member attributes. Tour members attracted to a tour leader’s charismatic guiding may become loyal customers of the travel agency, leading to greater success and growth of the travel agency.
Third, this study’s scale allows tour leaders to self-evaluate their charisma in leading tour groups; they can determine if the charisma they display meets the needs of the tour members. Tour leaders can also use the scale to improve or modify individual practice of charismatic guiding and in crafting tour leader form. Scale items highlight the characteristics or behaviors that a tour leader should display leading a tour group. For example, if tour leaders wish to demonstrate charismatic guiding with professional expertise, they can improve their communication and coordination ability, foreign language ability, commentary ability, and responsiveness to unexpected events.
Finally, when travel industry personnel discuss travel products with customers, the customer can complete the scale offered by this study to help industry personnel understand which attributes of charismatic guiding the customer expects. This communication helps tour leaders better meet the needs of tour members, thus improving customer satisfaction.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
The reliability and validity of this study were determined through a rigorous development process. Nonetheless some research limitations exist. First, the in-depth interviews and the two surveys included only Taiwanese nationals as respondents. This study was conducted in Taiwan, and the study results are likely to apply to countries with cultures or GPT practices similar to those in Taiwan. However, tour leaders and tour members from other Asian countries, or from non-Asian countries, where GPTs are prevalent were not included. As the job characteristics and requirements of tour leaders may vary among countries, tour leaders in other countries may play different roles (Luoh and Tsaur 2014; Weiler and Black 2014) or exhibit distinctive characteristics and behaviors to achieve charismatic guiding. Therefore, it is likely that the indexes and dimensions of charismatic guiding may differ among countries. To verify the context of charismatic guiding and the scale of this study, future studies should apply this scale to tour leaders and tour members from other countries, including China, Japan, Korea, and non-Asian countries.
Second, this study’s two surveys did not account for group-tour length, group-tour patterns (e.g., special interest tours and shopping tours), and group-member attributes (e.g., age and similarity). To generalize the scale, future studies should consider these factors. Third, the empirical validity test for the second survey considered only trust in tour members. However, studies on the antecedents and consequences of charismatic guidance in tour leaders are scarce. Future studies can use this study’s scale to conduct additional empirical tests of causal relationships.
Finally, owing to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that broke out in 2019 and continues, the scope of activities that tourists enjoy has been restricted. Consequently, tour members tend to demand more in terms of the expertise of tour leaders. Tour leaders and their charismatic ways have become more important in GPTs. In addition, tour groups have been smaller during the pandemic, which alters tour leader–tour member interactions (Zeng, Chen, and Lew 2020). Future studies should investigate if the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed other significant dimensions of charisma or uncovered potential measurement items that do not currently appear in the proposed scale. If these new elements exist, future research should determine if these neglected elements affect the generalizability of the study findings.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-jtr-10.1177_00472875211039556 – Supplemental material for Charismatic Tour-Guiding: Scale Development and Validation
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jtr-10.1177_00472875211039556 for Charismatic Tour-Guiding: Scale Development and Validation by Hsiu-Yu Teng and Sheng-Hshiung Tsaur in Journal of Travel Research
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology (R.O.C.) (Program No: MOST 107-2410-H-025-016).
Author Biographies
References
Supplementary Material
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