Six Thinking Hats strategy and employee skills: The mediating role of leadership style in hotels of the Aqaba Special Economic Zone.

Abstract: Sustained service quality in the hospitality industry rests on the cognitive and behavioral capabilities of front- line employees, and effective leadership is widely understood to shape how those capabilities develop. Structured cognitive frameworks have been proposed as tools to strengthen workforce skills, yet the conditions under which such frameworks translate into measurable skill gains remain unclear. This study examines the effect of Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats strategy on employee skill development in hotel service departments within the Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) in Jordan, treating leadership style as a mediating variable. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was administered to 350 administrative and non-administrative employees across 19 eco-friendly hotels operating in ASEZ, selected through stratified random sampling.
Data was analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling in SPSS and SMART-PLS, with 5,000 bootstrap replications used to test direct and indirect effects. Three hypotheses were tested. The Six Thinking Hats strategy produced a statistically significant positive effect on employee skills (β = 0.184, p < 0.001), supporting the first hypothesis. The strategy did not directly influence leadership style (β = 0.065, p = 0.190), disconfirming the second hypothesis. Leadership style significantly mediated the relationship between the strategy and employee skills (indirect β = 0.052, p = 0.035; 95% confidence interval 0.009 to 0.104), supporting the third hypothesis and confirming an indirect causal pathway. The findings indicate that cognitive interventions alone are insufficient; their effect on workforce capability is transmitted primarily through the prevailing leadership context. The study contributes to applied tourism and hospitality scholarship by clarifying the conditions under which structured cognitive training advances skill development, and offers practical implications for hotel managers, training designers, and tourism policymakers in tourism-dependent economies.