Organizational identification in hotel: The regulating influence of cohort difference on the relationship between empowering leadership and self-spirituality

Abstract This study intends to examine the nexus between empowering leadership on laborers’ self-spirituality and the mediating influence of organizational identification, as well as the regulating influence of cohort differences in hotels. This quantitative investigation dispatched 382 out of a total of 700 questionnaire-matched responses. The responses were gathered at three different time intervals. The outcome indicated that organizational identification mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and laborers’ self-spirituality, which facilitated the distribution of attractiveness and peculiarity of their assiduousness concerning individual performance. Furthermore, smaller cohort differences positively regulated empowering leadership and laborers’ self-spirituality and conversely. The major contribution is the implementation of essential assessments depending on the critical constructive components in the relevant field.


Introduction
China's hotels are well known for their attentive accommodation and high standard of servicing processes such as reservations, housekeeping, human resources, sales and marketing, front office, food, and beverage, etc. Good team leaders and high-quality laborers allow international hotels to pursue excellence while competing against other hotels worldwide (Intelligence Research Group, 2022; Kump & Schweiger, 2022;Zhang et al., 2019).In recent years, the output of the achievement of hotel laborers in China has sometimes confused leaders.Empowering leadership is essential in hotel scenarios that face large irresistible pressure to alter all organizational tasks to enhance laborers' performance, customer satisfaction, and overall job quality (Cavazotte et al., 2020).Furthermore, cohort differences among laborers relate to inter-action in organizations.Organizational age diversity is positively related to organizational capability, and a lower age variety causes greater capability (Cheung & Woo, 2021;Janahi et al., 2022;Luksyte et al., 2021).Cohort difference acts as the inter-action of age and period influences, while the sociological definition assumes period and age as mixed factors of the cohort difference (Mason et al., 1973).
Cohort differences represent a consequence of cohort discrepancies that influence members' capabilities.Thus, organizational identification boosts collaboration and cohort differences accelerate laborers from positively demonstrating their performance to be more concrete (Mittal & Dhar, 2016).Furthermore, chasing one's achievement, organizational identification accelerates laborers to enhance involvement, careers, and job quality.Therefore, empowering management and solid teamwork propels laborers to superiority.Therefore, these conceptual elements influence the overall performance of hotels in real-world scenarios.
This investigation verifies the nexus between empowering leadership and laborers' selfspirituality in hotels in China.Furthermore, this study investigates the regulatory influence of cohort differences and the mediating influence of organizational identification between empowering leadership and laborers' self-spirituality in hotels in China.This paper also demonstrates the inner features of empowering leadership and provides aspects for which suggestions are needed.Cheong et al. (2016) posited that empowering relates to laborers' performance and self-efficacy.Their study included promoting participation in providing autonomy from bureaucratic constraints, decision making, and conveying confidence in high achievement (Ahearne et al., 2005;Chen et al., 2007, Kirkman & Rosen, 1999;Zhang & Bartol, 2010), praising the elucidated inner motivation of laborers and the positive influences (Srivastava et al., 2006), and low reliability of power (Hakimi et al., 2010;Srivastava et al., 2006).

Empowering leadership
Empowering leadership refers to the procedure of sharing power with a laborer by depicting the importance of the laborer's job, offering greater decision-making autonomy, conveying reliance in the laborer's capabilities and removing hindrances to performance, implying that higher ranks of empowering leadership generate better outcomes (Chen et al., 2007;Vecchio et al., 2010, Zhang & Bartol, 2010).Empowering leaders share power with their subservients and offer them decisionmaking power.They also have confidence in laborers' ability to complete their tasks autonomously (Spreitzer, 1995).Arnold et al. (2000) posited that an authorizing leadership style refers to a kind of leadership behavior represented by granting certain powers to subordinates among authorized enterprise members, including setting an example, guiding behavior, information sharing, decisionmaking participation, and caring interaction.Bhatti et al. (2021) stated that most features share two essential components: support and autonomy (Amundsen & Martinsen, 2014).Arnold et al. (2000) posited that higher levels of empowerment must be related to positive psychological performance, such as higher levels of selfesteem, authenticity, and vitality, and lower levels of depression, anxiety, and neuroticism (Arnold et al., 2000;Kaluza et al., 2019).
Based on the measures developed by previous scholars, the three-dimensional scale of empowered leadership has been developed, comprising power sharing, development support, and multinational support (Bhatti et al., 2021) or the four-dimensional scale of empowered leadership has been involved, including elucidating laborers' work value, boosting laborers' role in strategymaking, presenting trust in laborers' perfect capability, removing hierarchical obstacles, and upgrading laborers' autonomy, underlining a direction to raise the intention of laborers to work (Ahearne et al., 2005;Arnold et al., 2000).
Managerial guiding skills can help leaders upgrade their techniques; therefore, they can change their activities in an energetic style (Campos-Moreira et al., 2020;Kalkavan & Ersin, 2019).Lin et al. (2022) posited that destructive influence disappears when managers have strong confidence in China's hotel laborers.Arnold et al. (2000) found that empowering leadership includes power sharing, organizational support (Amundsen & Martinsen, 2014), multivational support (Bhatti et al., 2021;Kozan, 1997), and autonomy (Gao et al., 2019;Spreitzer, 1995).This study defined empowering leadership as a procedure of sharing authority, assigning autonomy, and duties to subordinates, teams, or members via a definite set of leader actions for laborers to elucidate their inner intention and accomplish work achievement in organizations.

Organizational identification
Regarding organizational identification, Edwards (2005) argued that organizational identification boosts members' search for creative approaches to solve problems and to construct significant relationships with customers (Godfroid & Labie, 2023;Klimchak et al., 2016;Sethi, 2000).Furthermore, organizational identification can lead to members feeling a sense of loyalty, having a positive attitude towards the organization, and being motivated to act in ways that benefit the organization (Liu et al., 2021;Ma et al., 2021;Mittal & Dhar, 2016), which are essential for many organizations (Ma et al., 2016).Chan et al. (2018) averred that China's hotel laborer working under high levels of organizational identification can better identify with the hotel and engage in more positive behavior.Organizational identification is shaped by factors such as an individual's experiences within the organization, the organization's culture and values, and the individual's personal values and beliefs (Irshad & Bashir, 2020;Pratt, 1998).Kanjanakan et al. (2023) posited that organizational identification relates to a man's acknowledge of belonging within the hotels or facilities where they work.Organizational identification represents a positive strength and a highquality leader-member exchange nexus enhances self-spirituality by effects of organizational identification (Karanika-Murray et al., 2015;McGinley & Shi, 2022).
Therefore, organizational identification enables laborers to acknowledge their contributions to the hotel.This investigation specified organizational identification as a verification that boosts laborers' recognition of their dedications to serving tourists and solving their problems or requirements for the hotel.

Cohort difference
Concerning cohort differences, competitive behaviors could be arranged productively or ruinously, relying on many features of cohort discrepancy (Camara & Resnick, 1989).Conflict styles denote clumps of action in which individuals use conflict or normed responses (Hocker & Wilmot, 1995).Risk aversion influences tourists' selection in China's hotel with lower laborers' cohort discrepancy (Lin et al., 2023).Strategies are those that affect others to implement their general methods.Cohort difference is a management pattern representing uncooperative and aggressive actions (Sillars, 1986;Yu, 2022).Nickerson (2021) averred that the cooperative pattern showed an appeal for jointly advantageous determination through coordination and contending for consonant resolutions.Therefore, this investigation intends to affirm the definition of cohort differences and how they influence the nexus between empowering leadership and self-spirituality.This investigation presented the meaning of cohort difference as a discrepancy of perception from core laborers who boost laborers to accomplish self-spirituality (Harris et al., 2014;Nickerson, 2021;Sillars, 1986).Core laborers lead other laborers to chase the perception of implementation by empowering leadership or spiritual goals (Nickerson, 2021;Timothy & Conver, 2006).

Self-spirituality
Regarding self-spirituality, Bryant-Davis and Wong (2013) specified self-spirituality as a sense of fulfillment or a situation in which the individual chases a spiritual goal (Timothy & Conver, 2006).The fundamental propositions of self-spirituality were the real self and the main basis of one's perception of the personal mind, cogitation, and concepts that announced reasonable sources of information in the job (Zaidman, 2019).Walia et al. (2021) posited the contribution of selfspirituality in China's hotel laborers.Thus, self-spirituality means compliance and regarded as an origin of direction, meaning (Resch et al., 2020), and rights for laborers in companies, and it can facilitate people to follow management (Boyle & Healy, 2003;Cummings et al., 2014;Lychnell, 2017;Zaidman et al., 2017).This investigation defined self-spirituality as a person's reaction to chasing a sense of implementation or spiritual goal.Rai and Kim (2021) asserted that empowering leadership may be especially arranged to provide supervisors with a direction to deal with self-spirituality by offering them via a pragmatic utensil that helps them obtain recognition and arrange others' emotions and theirs more efficiently (Lang et al., 2022).Wörtler et al. (2022) posited that empowering could upgrade laborers' expression.Boedker and Chong (2022) posited initial empirical support for the potential advantage of cultivating empowering leadership and suggested that empowering leadership encourages individual well-being and resilience and has explicit influences on communicative skills and social behavior.Nevertheless, this is an emerging investigation domain, and a diversity of researchers have previously pointed out the capacity of empowering practice for leader development, recommending that it might influence laborers' decision-making, information management, and self-spirituality.Hence, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: Empowering leadership is positively related to self-spirituality in organizations

Nexus among organizational identification, self-spirituality, and empowering leadership
Since empowering leadership positively influences self-spirituality, the mental scenario raises a bound of demands for predominant laborers' tempering (Dee et al., 2003;Lee & Koh, 2001), and organizational identification explicitly affects self-spirituality (Namasivayam et al., 2014), indicating that organizational identification intermediates self-spirituality.Salem et al. (2022) averred that the passive nexus between empowering and obstructing organizational alter could be implicitly interpreted by the extent of general self-efficacy and hopefulness related to empowerment.Thus, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 2: Organizational identification positively intermediates the nexus between empowering leadership and self-spirituality.

Nexus relevant to self-spirituality, cohort difference, and empowering leadership
Empowering leadership positively influences self-spirituality (Boedker & Chong, 2022;Namasivayam et al., 2014).Heikamp et al. (2020) averred that companies' belonging and cohesion (Graham & Jones, 2019;Pierce et al., 2009) are intermediating roles in the nexus between their self-spirituality and performance.Burchi et al. (2020) asserted that whenever workers' self-control principals are exhausted, they would result in unethical behavior, such as verbally injured people or emotional fatigue (Christian & Ellis, 2011).Nonetheless, empowering leadership positively influences self-spirituality; the lesser the cohort difference that emerges, the lesser the self-spirituality of laborers and organizational efficiency is corrupted and reversely (Detert et al., 2007;Dunlop & Lee, 2004;Mitchell et al., 2022;Zaidman, 2019).This study investigates the moderating influence of cohort differences between self-spirituality and empowering leadership.Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 3: Cohort differences regulate the nexus between empowering leadership and selfspirituality in organizations.

Methodology
This quantitative investigation provides valuable insights for regular hotel laborers.Thompson (2000) suggested that the ratio of each item to the sample number is approximately 1:10 to 1:15.This investigation dispatched 382 out of a total of 700 questionnaire-matched responses (54.57% replies) that were passed for the last examination.This investigation identified the outcome by analyzing the process that has been widely used in recent studies (Au & Tsang, 2022;Pan et al., 2011).
Questionnaires were collected from hotel laborers at three time intervals.The laborers dealt with the relative affairs of hotels in China.This study obtained consent from the human resource department; furthermore, they helped us in the assessment error.The advice requested the subjects of this investigation from the interviewees, and merciful participation and ensuring the confidence of their replies.This investigation properly arranged all the investigations.The laborers responded to their statistical data and awareness of empowering leadership at Time 1. Laborers responded at Time 2 about cohort differences and organizational identification a calendar month after Time 1. Thereafter, laborers replied at Time 3 for self-spirituality a calendar month after the second time.
To decrease common method variance (CMV), questionnaires were collected at three time intervals (Podsakoff & Organ, 1986;Podsakoff et al., 2003Podsakoff et al., , 2012;;Simmering et al., 2015;Spector, 2019;Spohn et al., 2022).The study gathered empowering leadership data in August 2020.In September 2020, this investigation gathered cohort differences and organizational identification question sheets.Finally, in October 2020, this investigation gathered self-spirituality questionnaires were administered.This investigation made all investigations properly coded and matched.
Question sheets using a 5-point Likert-type measure were made in empowering leadership (EL), and an example question contains "My leader expresses that I shall take charge" (adjusted from Amundsen & Martinsen, 2014;Bhatti et al., 2021;Gao et al., 2019;Kozan, 1997), organizational identification (OI), and an example item comprises "I am very keen on what people consider about my organization" (adjusted from Anaza, 2015; Klimchak et al., 2016;Mael & Ashforth, 1992), cohort difference (CD), and an example item includes "I disgust someone who damages the personnel of the organization" (adjusted from Ganzach, 2022;Hocker & Wilmot, 1995;Sillars, 1986), and selfspirituality (SS), and an example item includes "Our leader motivates we when we feel anxious" (adjusted from Boyle & Healy, 2003;Lychnell, 2017;Neeman-Haviv & Wilchek-Aviad, 2022;Zaidman et al., 2017).In addition, 5 equaled to "strongly agree and 1 equaled to "strongly disagree."" The items on the question sheet were first inscribed in English, and a skilled interpreter and proof-reader helped to translate these questionnaires into simplified Chinese for the original interviewees (Smith et al., 2023;Yang et al., 2012).To confirm the correctness of the translation, this study used the unseeing interpretation-back-interpretation skill (Brislin, 1976;Stinson et al., 2022).This investigation concerns the influence of core laborers' cohort discrepancies, such as leaders, on organizational members' approach to self-spirituality in companies.Specifically, the smaller the cohort discrepancy, the larger the influence of empowering leadership on laborers to chase selfspirituality affirmatively and reciprocally.This study utilized the cohort difference equation proposed by Harris et al. (2014).The equation is as follows: where CD i is core laborer i's value of CD, CD j is laborer j's value of CD, and k is the overall number of interviewees in this investigation.Larger laborers represent a bigger gap between laborers' CD property and that of other laborers in this investigation.

Analysis
Table 1 presents interviewees' profiles and demographic statistics.82 hotels based on market share in eastern China, were purposively sampled.Females (55.5%) had a larger number of vital signs.The information presented about 222 items that were not married (58.1%).Moreover, the information indicates that approximately 57.6% described obtaining a college certificate, and 27.0% reported that they received a diploma from an advanced degree program.The most massive working years of the sample were between 11 and 15 years (20.4%), and the subsequent unit was between 16 and 20 years (18.6%).The majority of the interviewees' working division was the front office division (20.9%).

Results via confirmatory factor analysis
The factor examination showed that the overall factor loadings were not less than .554.  2).
Questionnaires were collected at three time intervals to decrease CMV (Hair et al., 2010;Podsakoff et al., 2003).The analysis of fitness shows that the framework is appropriate for further interpretation, and the relative evaluation metrics of the IFI are .887,the PNFI is .565, the BCC is 242.328, 358.571, and .919.The merging reliability presents as fitting for the quality of this investigation, but the framework is merely fair.Additionally, correlation analyses of these conceptual variables are extremely pertinent, as presented in Table 3.

Results
This investigation verifies the mediating influence of organizational identification, the regulating influence of cohort differences, and the noteworthy explicit influence of empowering leadership on self-spirituality between the nexus of empowering leadership and self-spirituality through the robust validity of the process method (Hayes, 2017;Hayes & Scharkow, 2013).
Under the strict test, Table 4 indicates that the regulatory influence of the cohort difference (Beta=−.151*,Se = .061)with the interrelation (Beta=−.247**,Se = .077)between the nexus of empowering leadership and self-spirituality and empowering leadership can forecast selfspirituality (Beta = 1.351***,Se = .262)via the intervening influence of organizational identification (Beta=.982*,Se = .282).Furthermore, empowering leadership assuredly forecasts organizational identification (Beta=.030*,Se = .038)and cohort differences (Beta = 3.87***, Se = .040).Thus, Hypothesis 1 was validated.Regarding Hypotheses 2 and 3, this investigation employed bootstrapping utilizing a 95% margin of error.The implicit consequence of empowering leadership on self-spirituality via cohort difference was (Beta=−.005,margin of error: .001 to .018), and the explicit influence via organizational identification was (Beta = 3.871***, margin of error: .284 to .509).As no zero among the values, Hypotheses 2 and 3 were also validated.The outcomes of the framework through this process are presented in Figure 1 and Table 5.

Discussion
Using Boedker and Chong (2022), this study investigated and revealed the results for the links between empowering leadership and laborers' self-spirituality, implicitly through organizational identification and explicitly through cohort differences in China's hotel laborers.Compared with other studies (Yu, 2022), this investigation reveals that the similarities between machinery and hotel organizations are the mediator role of organizational identification and the negative role of cohort difference.Besides, the differences reveal that the cohort difference has a stronger influence on China's hotel laborers than the machinery ones, and the service orientation is more evident in hotels compared to machinery organizations.The primary discovery regarding the explicit connection between empowering leadership and laborers' self-spirituality complies with previous evaluations, suggesting that empowering leadership shapes laborers' self-spirituality (Boedker & Chong, 2022;Gao et al., 2019;Kozan, 1997).This investigation lengthens this evaluation by showing that empowering leadership is indispensable to the self-spirituality of laborers in hotels and praises the elucidated inner motivation of laborers and the positive influences (Srivastava et al., 2006).The next discovery of this investigation regarding the intermediary influence of organizational identification between empowering leadership and selfspirituality suggests that the cognitions of organizational inclusion and cohesion in organizations escalate self-spirituality because it is obvious that it is mistaken to carry certain interpretations for difficult problems under empowering leadership.Previous evaluations examined organizational identification only with ingenuity, which has been linked with the cognition of being affixed to or joined with a group (Bellucci et al., 2023;Mittal & Dhar, 2016), and laborers, which are essential to the accomplishment of many groups (Ma et al., 2016).This investigation's discovery enlarged them so that they strike self-spirituality via the foundational procedure in the hotel industry.

Mean
A previous examination of the influence of cohort discrepancy in organizations confirms the feature of cohort discrepancy on laborers' nexus (Nickerson, 2021;Sillars, 1986;Timothy & Conver, 2006;Yu, 2022).The final finding of this investigation proves the substantial regulatory influence of cohort differences between empowering leadership and the self-spirituality nexus in the hotel industry.Cohort difference is a discrepancy in the perception of core laborers that propels laborers to accomplish self-spirituality (Cummings et al., 2014;Harris et al., 2014;Mitchell et al., 2022;Sillars, 1986).The outcomes manifest the negative influence of cohort differences between empowering leadership and laborers' self-spirituality in companies whenever the cohort difference is larger but assertive whenever the cohort difference is smaller.Self-spirituality can facilitate hotels' laborers to follow management (Boyle & Healy, 2003;Cummings et al., 2014;Lychnell, 2017;Zaidman et al., 2017), when the lesser the cohort difference that emerges, the lesser the self-spirituality of laborers and organizational efficiency is corrupted and reversely (Detert et al., 2007;Dunlop & Lee, 2004;Mitchell et al., 2022;Zaidman, 2019).Thus, this investigation confirms the influence of cohort differences, thereby helping with organizational behavior studies.

Conclusions
This investigation revealed certain essential managerial interpretations.First, hotel managers ought to care about how they act in the organization to the extent that their empowering behaviors evoke self-spirituality among laborers.Furthermore, empowering leadership predicting self-spirituality via organizational identification denotes this investigation's subsequent implication that the human resource division in hotel organizations might impel leaders to implement empowering management in order that it can stimulate organizational inclusion and cohesion, and self-spirituality amidst laborers.Furthermore, self-spirituality relates to job achievement (Cantarelli et al., 2016;Kong et al., 2018;Tribe & Paddison, 2023), and relates to a source of implication, empowerment, and path for laborers in  organizations, and it could support people in tackling job activities (Lychnell, 2017;Mitchell et al., 2022;Zaidman et al., 2017), thereafter it stimulates additional advantages for management in hotels.The novelty of the research is the explicit influence of cohort differences in China's hotel laborers.Empowering leadership predicts self-spirituality regulated by cohort differences, representing the third connotation regarding the influence of cohort differences in the hotel industry.As a leader's action is the expression of organizational values and strategies, laborers consider empowering leaders to motivate laborers to accomplish their self-spirituality; thus, it arouses more valuable achievements in organizations.Therefore, laborers enhance their inner intention and accomplish work achievement in organizations (Timothy & Conver, 2006;Zaidman, 2019).
Regarding distinctive examples, most managers in Jin Jiang Hotels, engaged in hotel investment and management, transportation services, and related travel services are the main businesses, and participate in real estate, trade, and financial business for a long period, are motivated to reduce the cohort difference and encourage laborers to take inservice education under achievement and expense systems and boost their self-spirituality for refined job achievement.Furthermore, Jin Jiang Hotels struggles to gain more benefit by refining its leader-laborers' management with escalating laborers' self-spirituality and organizational identification over several years.

Limitation and future research
This study has certain shortcomings that should be addressed in future studies.Above all, this investigation gathered data from three separate time intervals amidst the hotels to decrease the CMV (Podsakoff et al., 2003), and subsequent studies can collect panel data.Second, all variables were leaders' and laborers' self-disclosure, so the following study can obtain other-disclosed question sheets.Conclusively, this investigation implemented research in hotels in China; thus, subsequent studies can properly emulate the research findings in other fields or industries.That is, the results can be generalized for a population of hotel laborers.Furthermore, hotel researchers can examine various leadership styles, latent regulators, and intermediaries via this framework.
Figure 1.A suggested framework.