Contemporary Leadership and the Challenges It Faces - Essay Example

Contemporary leadership and its challenges in luxury hotels Introduction The models of contemporary leadership state that effective leadership is the one whereby leaders posses behavioral and cognitive capability to realize and address paradox, contradicting and complex issues in workplace. There is increasing understanding of the contemporary leadership models in sectors such as luxury hotels because of the increasing diversity, complexness, and rapid leadership changes in contemporary organizations. According to Winston & Patterson (2006), an effective leader is one who is able to train, equip, select, influence his or her followers with diverse skills, abilities, and shape them to be effective workers to ensure that the organization achieves its goals and objectives (p.13). Leadership styles are changing rapidly to enable leaders address the contemporary challenges. This essay aims at evaluating contemporary leadership and the challenges contemporary leaders face in luxury hotels. The current models of leadership include transformational, charismatic, and transactional. Transactional leadership model basis on service exchange for several types of rewards that leaders control (Leithwood 2007, p. 8). Transactional leaders are those who are able to determine the kinds of rewards that will motivate employees and enable them meet their objectives and goals. On the other side, transformational leadership refers to the actions that transformative leaders create to empower participants who take part in the process. (p. 10). Transformational leaders have the capability of bringing up significant change to his or her followers. That is, transformational leadership facilitates redefining of individuals’ goals and objectives, renew their dedications, and restructure their process of accomplishing their goals (p. 12). A charismatic leader has supernatural powers over his or her subordinates. According to Conger and Kanungo (2004), a charismatic leader is a leader who has extraordinary and profound impacts on his or her subordinates due to his or her personal abilities (p. 637). The subordinate staff of a charismatic leader has loyalty and trust towards the values, visions, and characters of the leader. Charismatic leaders make use of their powers rather than positional powers to encourage subordinates achieve the organization’s goals and objectives. According to contemporary leadership theories, current leaders should ensure dynamic relationship between them and their collaborators for leading both parties to extreme levels of moral growth and development and motivation hence evoking “true” change in an organization. Basing argument on this definition, there are three key principles that contemporary leadership should ensure: mutual (sharing things in common), collaborations (working as a team), and relationship (connection between individuals) (Denison, Hooijberg & Quinn 2005, p. 524). Therefore, collaborators influence leaders to work as a team to achieve a specific goal. Below are two contemporary leadership theories that leaders should focus on in order to ensure effective leadership towards success of an organization. One of the contemporary leadership theories is the trait theory. This theory states that for a leader to be effective, he, or she should possess specific character traits. According to this theory, if a contemporary leader has leadership traits, then he or she can lead effectively no matter what situation. Contemporary leadership focuses on “what an individual is” rather than what he or she can accomplish. Therefore, for a leader to be effective in the current contemporary leadership, he or she should have leadership traits (Diamante & London 2007, p. 407). The generally dissatisfaction of trait theory of leadership results to behavioral theory. This theory mainly focuses on the actions of a leader. In contemporary leadership, leaders should have excellent leadership behaviors. Whatever leadership strategies implemented in an organization, effective leadership and implementation of employees’ activities are the key ingredients to ensure advanced business performance. Ensuring smooth running is the key to organizational success (Emmerling Shanwal & Mandal 2008, p. 45). Contemporary leadership practices and policies currently play vital roles to ensure that an organization achieves its goals. However, contemporary leadership in hospitality and industry sectors such as Luxury hotels faces several challenges. Luxury hotels’ leadership nowadays faces many challenges, which are brought up by technological advancement, globalization, intellectual capital, change, and profitability (Manning & Curtis 2003, p. 76). These challenges force luxury hotels’ leadership management to develop new strategies that will enable them to address the challenges. To begin with, luxury hotel customers are currently concerned with quality service and not just services. For instance, the U.K. government allocated £ 112 to fund hospitality and industry training. The Marriott Hotel Executive Chairman, J.W. Marriott Jr. highly welcomed this governmental fund. This highly portrayed that employee training is one of the major challenges affecting contemporary leadership in luxury hotels sector. Staffs are very crucial, but they are expensive resources in industry. In order for contemporary leaders to enable the luxury hotels to maintain effective employee performance, they should optimize their contribution through training (Schnake, Dumler & Cochran 2004, p. 354). For instance, J.W. Marriott Jr. argued that, as they approached the 2012 Olympics, luxury hotel sector is in skills competition to ensure that they have quality services to match the customers’ demand. Another challenge faced by contemporary leadership in luxury hotel sector is customer care. Studies reveal that, customers prefer organizations, which show care for their needs. In current luxury hotel operations, customer care is an essential factor that the leaders should put more concern. This is because; customers’ anticipations for quality food and services are highly increasing presenting luxury hotels with a two-edge sword. Additionally, seeking and keeping qualified employees who can ensure quality services to customers is another challenge affecting luxury hotels contemporary leaders (Rosete & Ciarrochi 2005, p. 56). This is why; most leaders are being forced to train the existing employees in different fields to ensure customers enjoy quality services. Another critical issue affecting current managers in luxury hotels is lack of enough capital. Without diligent cash flows, leadership will face challenges since the organization will be unable to raise money to cater for debts and fund the next operating cycles. Most contemporary leaders are unable to overcome the challenges of insufficient cash flows and fail to understand why banks and other financial institutions cannot fund the business (Raelin 2003, p. 45). Stress management is another issue affecting current leadership in tourism hotel sector. Within the context of hospitality industry such as hotel sector, work stress is currently being recognized as a key challenge affecting human resources. This challenge is occurring due to interpersonal conflicts in workplace. In U.K., the main stressful industry sector to lead is the luxury hotel sector since this sector serves inebriated customers and clients (Northhouse 2010, p. 87). Sexual harassment and violence are currently among the major issues faced by the contemporary leaders in hospitality industry sector. Stress challenges in luxury hotel sector include serving a large population of customers, increased customer demand for quality services, and timely services especially in the restaurants and kitchens, and untrained supervisors (Palaima & Skaržauskienė 2010, p. 337). All these issues result to low employees’ control during their work. This highly challenges the leaders in this sector since they should ensure that they meet the customer demands such as quality services. Conclusion In conclusion, the key to successful organization in current world is effective leadership. Contemporary leadership entails that leaders should have good leadership traits to enable their followers meet the organizational goals. However, contemporary leadership in hospitality industry is facing many challenges. This entails that a contemporary leader should be able to come up with effective decisions and solution to enable him or her overcome these challenges. Contemporary leadership indicates that an effective leader is one who is able to train, equip, select, influence his or her followers with diverse skills, abilities, and shape them to be effective workers to ensure that the organization achieves its goals and objectives. Therefore, effective leadership and implementation of employees’ activities are the key ingredients to ensure advanced business performance. 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