Perceived Leadership Styles and Job Satisfaction in Croatian Hotels: A Competitive Modelling Approach

This paper examines how employees in Croatian hotels relate their direct supervisors’ leadership behaviors to job satisfaction. Survey data were collected from 153 hotel employees across departments and hotels of different sizes. Leadership was assessed through five styles (autocratic, laissez-faire, democratic, transformational, and transactional), while job satisfaction was measured across six dimensions. The hypothesized relationships were tested using competitive regression models in which all leadership styles were entered simultaneously, complemented by a moderation test and relative-importance analysis. The results show a differentiated pattern. Transformational leadership is positively related to staff development and management satisfaction and also shows a positive association with salary satisfaction. Transactional leadership is most strongly linked to salary satisfaction, while it relates negatively to staff development satisfaction when other styles are controlled. Democratic leadership is positively associated with management satisfaction, but its unique association with staff development satisfaction is contingent on hotel size: it is negative in small hotels and attenuates to non-significance in medium-sized and large hotels. Autocratic leadership is generally associated with lower satisfaction in key domains, whereas laissez-faire leadership does not show meaningful unique effects in the competitive models. These findings provide evidence from the Croatian hotel sector and suggest that leadership development and HR support systems should be aligned with the specific satisfaction domains hotels seek to improve.