Why Leadership Style Alone Isn't Enough: Organizational Commitment as the Missing Link Between Women's Leadership and Performance

Abstract

This study examines how women's leadership style shapes employee performance at Madifushi Private Island Resort in the Maldives, and whether organizational commitment carries that effect. The resort has faced a persistent 34 percent employee turnover rate at the same time that the share of women in leadership positions rose from 28 percent in 2022 to 50 percent in 2026, and almost no prior research has examined women's leadership in a setting as geographically isolated as a private island resort. Data were collected from all 100 eligible employees using total sampling and analyzed with Structural Equation Modeling–Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) in SmartPLS 4.0. Women's leadership style had no significant direct effect on employee performance (t = 1.533; p = 0.063) but had a strong, significant, positive effect on organizational commitment (t = 15.532; p = 0.000). Organizational commitment, in turn, significantly improved performance (t = 3.303; p = 0.000) and fully mediated the relationship between leadership style and performance (t = 3.251; p = 0.001; VAF = 53.3%). These findings show that women's leadership in this hospitality setting influences performance mainly by building employees' emotional attachment and loyalty rather than acting on performance directly, offering new evidence from an understudied resort-island context and a standpoint-informed research design that examines women's leadership practice on its own terms.