The Role of Empowering Village Managers in Tourism Industry: A Case Study of Bojnord Villages

The present study entitled ‘The Role of Empowering Village Managers in Tourism Industry: A Case Study of Bojnord Villages’ aimed at investigating and analyzing the village managers and councils’ performance. The main question to be scrutinized was “Does empowering village managers play an effective role in developing tourism industry?” To answer the question, the following hypothesis was formulated: “Empowering village managers is essential in developing tourism industry.” The instrument was a questionnaire whose validity was determined through Delphi and whose reliability through Chronbach’s Alpha. The population of the study was composed of rural people of Bojnord chosen from 223 villages with an entire population of 158,665 people. The sampling method was multi-cluster sampling. These villages were chosen from among those that enjoyed tourist attractions and empowering village managers which could potentially gain benefits from the results of the present study. Thus the two axes of tourism including 20 villages with a population of 21,516 people were chosen as the sample population from which the subjects of the study were randomly selected. To determine the sample population, the researcher applied Morgan scale where 52 rural managers were sampled out to take the questionnaires. Having been collected and processed, the data were analyzed through SPSS and Spearman Ranking Correlations. The results revealed that there was a significant relationship between empowering village managers and tourism industry development. Based on the results, the most important problems of the managers in tourism industry development were their lack of knowledge, financial resource deficiency, and the absence of new technology. To solve the problems requires the manager cooperation and government’s support in all the grounds of development.