دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی گردشگری مذهبی و توسعه رهبری معنوی: کنفرانس رهبری مسیحی - الزویر 2018

abstract

Christian leadership conferences are an increasingly relevant form of special events for leaders within ministry roles. Despite considerable anecdotal research, it is largely unknown what intrinsically motivates these leaders to attend a Christian leadership conference and if this motivation/s is homogenous. Through employing spiritual leadership and core competencies to identify intrinsic motivations to attend a Christian leadership conference, five segments are conceptualised. Whilst two motivations that mirror the key event theme and manifest the internal reward for most respondents, the segments differ significantly on key criterion, most notably their usual place of residence. Tourism and event academics and practitioners should carefully use the research findings when seeking to develop theory or attract attendees to Christian leadership conferences.

Discussions and conclusions

By designing a conceptual framework that includes first spiritual leadership theory (Fry, 2003), second the core competencies of church leadership (Malphurs & Mancini, 2004) and third the key profiling segmentation variables (e.g. Tkaczynski & Rundle-Thiele, 2011), this research's greatest theoretical contribution is the conceptualisation of an intrinsically motivated religious tourist. Tourists to these events attend for self-effacing purposes and can be motivated to perform their ministry tasks to serve others more effectively. Coupled with research into external drivers for event attendance (Getz, 2010; Li & Petrick, 2006), the research findings can be applied to different organisational contexts to provide greater understanding of the motivation of a tourist to attend an event that focuses on altruism and leadership development. The four core competences (Malphurs & Mancini, 2004) of the religious tourist reflect altruistic values which can influence their cognition (e.g. knowledge, development) and affections (e.g. emotions) which will correlate to behaviour (doing). This could produce greater organisational commitment and productivity (Dent, Higgins, & Wharff, 2005; Fry & Nisiewicz, 2013) in the face of potential burnout, depression or discouragement (Chand, 2015; Crank, 2014) which represents the essence of spiritual development (Fry et al., 2017). Specifically, focusing on these core competencies could limit issues relating to workplace conflict, limited financial or social reward, and/or disagreement on vision by focusing on a more altruistic purpose of serving others as the priority. Whilst the core competencies of knowledge (knowing), skills (doing), emotions (feelings) and character (being) appear mutually inclusive, the two key motivations of spiritual encouragement (skills) and to better equip in my current organisational role (character) represent key drivers of conference attendance that mirror the event theme. This differs significantly from previous event studies (Bowen & Daniels, 2005; Tkaczynski & Rundle-Thiele, 2013) that identify other activities or motivations not promoted as the main event focus. For effective target marketing and positioning, a key clear focus (Chen & Uysal, 2002; Pike & Ryan, 2004) needs to be upheld to “cut through the clutter”, and the spiritual development theory emphasis on altruistic characteristics such as developing skills and character to serve others should be promoted further within religious contexts. Through following this process, religious event organisers and tourism officials can heighten the perceived internal values of ministry leaders that can drive altruistic cognition, emotions and behaviour.