Leadership in Destination Management: Its Implications in a Systemic Approach

This paper aims at understanding the existing links between leadership and governance in the destinations. According to several contributions on the issue, agreeing that a pivotal subject is necessary for the development of a destination, the paper wants to analyze the contents of a successful leadership within the destination management, considering two different levels of analysis. First of all, the research emphasizes the process through which a subject becomes a pivotal actor in a systemic approach, referring both to the territorial marketing initiatives and the actions improving territorial attractiveness such as investments, promotion, destination brand building and coordination of the local actors. In this process, the pivotal subject can be represented by a local actor or created ad hoc. Second, in today’s hypercompetitive context, once the pivotal actor is legitimated, it is important to define which are the human resources capabilities that contribute improving the leadership skills of the pivotal actor in terms of governance choices and coordination of the local actors in order to gain and sustain the competitive advantage of the destination.