Impact of empowerment on the organizational behavior in 5 star hotels - Essay Example

Impact of empowerment on the organizational behavior in 5 star hotels Hotel industry is people oriented industry. More than the process and technology it is the people who have mattered in determining the service quality in hotel industry. It is the courtesy, mannerism and attitude of the attending staff towards customers which determines the customer perceptions of the service quality of any hotel apart from engendering a loyalty sentiment in the customer resulting in the patronization and repeat purchase of the hotel’s service offerings. It is generally acknowledged that organizations work with several resources. These include capital, physical equipment, land and buildings and people. People are their most important resource. In fact organizations are also generically selling their goods or services to another set of people i.e. the customers. For any commercial organization it is then a people versus people equation for its survival. Unlike other resources which an organization deploys people or its staff are live resources that think, have feelings, aspirations, motives and emotions which get nurtured, developed ,frustrated or stunted every now and then. No human would be willing to work with frustrated aspirations or stunted and suppressed feelings. Thus it becomes incumbent on an organization to nurture and develop the feelings, aspirations, emotions of its employees. This is the traditional function of the human resource management function in any organization. Present day literature, however lays more emphasis on strategic human resource management wherein the human resource management function is aligned in such a manner that fulfilling human resource management function automatically ensures reaching strategic objectives of the organization. In short the human resource management function is woven with in the overall strategy of the organization. Strategic approach to human resource management implies putting in place a set of internally consistent policies and practices that ensure that organization’s human capital (skills, combined knowledge of employees and abilities) contributes to organizations strategic objectives. Whereas a bare approach to Human resources management is a self explained concept without its strategic orientation. It refers to all those activities that are undertaken consciously or unconsciously, internally or externally to an organization whereby human resources of the organization are developed and utilized in a manner to maximize achievement of organizational goals. One important precept of entire human resources' management exercise is the recognition of the fact that the most valuable resource for any organization is its human factor; it is the only live factor and thus the only truly mouldable factor. Therefore human resource management (HRM) is a term used to represent that part of an organization’s activities concerned with the recruitment, development and management of its employees (Wood & Wall, 2002). Employee empowerment is an important piece of strategic initiatives in human resource management in any hotelling organization. Empowerment if adopted as a conscious strategy has important implications for employee motivation, performance and the quality of the service offered by the hotel. This paper seeks to examine the issue of employee empowerment in some star hotels in Jordan in the back drop of a comprehensive literature review. The Hotel Industry Parks (2003) states with abundant clarity the role of human interface in hotel industry in following words,” The hospitality industry is obviously customer-service driven.  If your employees aren’t satisfied in their jobs, their unhappiness is bound to spill over into their attitudes and behaviors toward clients and guests.  Most hospitality positions require people to be in constant communication with the public while servicing guests.  Because of this, employee satisfaction is vitally important to the success of your business.  Everyone knows that it costs much more to hire and train a new employee than it does to keep an existing employee.  However, besides the monetary benefits, tenured employees provide many more advantages to the company.  In Adenekan Dedeke (2003) service quality was framed as being dependent on composite results that a service provider and its systems offered a customer. In contrast to the approach that depicts service quality as a discrepancy construct, this paper frames the concept as a fulfillment-oriented construct. Accordingly the underlying variables were defined. To implement a context-dependent Services quality instrument, paper argued for use of a service quality grid to classify firms according to their outcomes and dominant service-encounter interactions. Three kinds of dominant interactions are introduced: customer-to-staff, customer-to-technology, and customer-to-product/services. Employee empowerment critically affect the customer-to-staff interaction in that a highly motivated staff which is working within a sphere of a wide decision making choice can improve substantially this vital and dominant interaction. Parks (2003 can again be cited as follows,” Employees with high tenure in the hospitality industry can offer benefits to the company both internally and externally. Internally, employees know the business. They know what the issues and challenges are, and they are comfortable taking the lead or taking an active part in company decisions. These people are also more experienced and can also assist or be a mentor to newer employees when needed, taking the sole responsibility of guidance off of management.  Externally, tenured employees know the organization so well that they are knowledgeable when talking to customers.  They can anticipate problems or concerns with guests and clients more quickly and can address them correctly when they happen”.  Therefore ideally the hotel industry would tend to deploy its various resources with three overbearingly important focuses: employees, clientele and education by incorporating: technology; power paradigms; training and development; compensation; employee relations; and family, society, and work balance (Berger, Fulford and Krazmien 1993). This paper would look at the power paradigms in terms of employee empowerment and discover the impact of empowerment concepts on employee motivation and performance in star hotel milieu. Important use of empowerment concepts can be found in Hotels, particularly in respect of lower rung employees. For instance Ruddy(1990) found that while the behavioral practices of hotel managers had a significant impact on hotel success ;the top-down management strategy of hotels allowed employees to begin at the lowest rung and aspire for higher positions ,however, base service employees such as housekeeping did not often have those opportunities due to educational constraints. For such lower rung employees, empowerement can be a concept which can enrich their jobs apart from giving them an opportunity to them to reveal their potential for assuming higher responsibilities. Hypothesis Statement While this paper does not specifically test a hypothesis in the statistical sense; it does try to validate certain observations and statements pertaining to the concept of employee empowerment in the hotel industry. These statements can be reckoned somewhat similar to hypotheses. These are stated as follows: (i) Hotel Employees have an innate desire to excel and they distinctly expect and need empowerment within their job description; (ii) Management (human resource function and top management) has a nebulous understanding of the concept of employee empowerment and hence their inability to put in place effective empowerment strategies. (iii) Empowerment leads to better delivery of service quality in hotel milieu. These statements were sought to be validated through methods triangulation involving a questionnaire survey and an in-depth literature search and review. Read More