Supervision in Hospitality Management - Essay Example

Effective leadership of work teams depends more on a through understanding of the dynamics of group interactions than on understanding the behaviour of individuals within teams.” Introduction Services in hospitality or hotel industry are perishable for a hotel room unsold is an opportunity lost forever as un-storable item. While in off-seasons, the fixed costs will be a drain on profitability due to high fixed cost, peak seasons will result in excess demand the hotel cannot make use of. The services are intangible in that is not possible to accurately attribute benefits to any particular feature of the hotel service. Often they may be due to the personality of the hotel staff and image of the hotel establishment. Services rendered are heterogeneous because each guest has a different purpose for the visit. Where as one may be attending a conference, another one may be on weekend break package. The services are contact-dependant in that physical interaction between the service provider and service consumer is unavoidable and the consumer has to make choices staying in particular hotel before actually experiencing the service. And there is no ownership of services bestowed to consumers in a hotel industry setting. Thus relationship between a hotel management and its customer is unique. (Jones & Lockwood, 2002 p11) The nature of the services therefore gains significance in that successful operations of hospitality industry depends on synergy of groups which should operate as teams with characteristics of interdependence amongst the team members. This calls for effective leadership to lead the teams. Supervision in hospitality management involves significant group dynamics for its success. Interdependence Interdependence is the key to understanding successful teamwork. Teams are not merely groups of individuals having different objectives. Members of the team are inseparably attached to one another with a common objective to achieve. In hospitality industry, this need for a cohesive team manifests in day to day operations. Interdependence in an organization are of two kinds; structural and behavioural. Structural interdependence signifies features that are not related to an individual’s behaviour. This may be as a result of the work itself. The structural interdependence again is of two kinds; task interdependence and outcome interdependence. The former arises when there are inputs required from multiple individuals to complete the work. This is also known as means interdependence. Thus actions of one member of the team will elicit or constrain the action of other members of the team; The latter refers to the consequences of the outcome depending upon the collective performance of the tasks. For example a reward as an outcome depends on the collective performance of the team. (Wageman, 2001) Leadership A supervisor in a hospitality industry must understand the dynamics of interactions of the individuals in a team for an effective leadership. A greatest challenge before him in an industry of high labour turnover is that he must keep the employees adequately motivated. The high labour turnover is such that one of out of every eight Americans now in jobs has worked in McDonald’s which was started 55 years ago. The fact is 8 percent of Americans are employed in foodservice and the hospitality industry is comprised of 70 percent part-timers. Restaurants and hotels serve as launch pads for many job seekers and these jobs are invariably low wage and entry level positions. They do the multiple tasks from cleaning of utensils, serving foods on the tables to cleaning messy rooms left by the occupants. (Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 p 40) Importance of teams Success lies in transforming groups into effective teams where members are interdependent as explained above. For hospitality industry, their competitive advantage is their employees. Employees are the differentiating factor between hospitality organisations that offer the same type of goods and services. This is explained by witnessing employees loitering and speaking to themselves without attending to the customers in some organisations and employees producing synergy by helping each other to completing tasks of serving their customers in some other organisations. In order to understand the dynamics involved in Total Quality Management, one needs to understand the difference between groups and teams, teams norms and the ways of influencing the teams, how to build up teams, transforming of groups into teams, characteristics of the teams and their successful creation, and employee empowerment. A thorough understanding and application of these concepts will result in effective supervision of the teams in the hospitality industry. (Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 ) Nature of a team As pointed elsewhere, teams are different from groups. Whereas a group has several people working with different objectives or interact to accomplish a specified objective by sharing information and remaining neutral, a team is a special group of people working around a task. The teams both evolve informally or formed specifically in a formal manner. Teams are formed to achieve positive collaboration in order to become successful. A successful team is characterised by the adaptive attitude, flexibility of the team members who also display their ability to resolve conflicts in their tasks. In a formal team, there is a team leader. He has the power to influence the members of the team and has the decision making authority. For example a head server is a formally appointed leader in a restaurant having been delegated with responsibility and authority to carry out night checkouts or some other task by the management. On the other hand an informal team evolving on its own will have leaders in rotation. And in this case, the leader does not have any power over the group. It is advantageous because leadership coming in turns gives the advantage for the team to be benefited by the capabilities of all the persons coming in turns so that possibility of a burden of an ineffective permanent leader is avoided. (Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 ) Team purpose Teams are formed to carry out difficult tasks jointly. For example, a night server who cannot do all the tasks by himself can depend on other team members to clean the table, resetting the table, waiting on people while he can serve food. Thus it is a cooperative effort by which a task is achieved by literally making it as a full hand going in and out of kitchen.( Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 ) Team norms Team norms are observed by the team members but only informally. Thus if one of them comes late for the work, the others will cover the late comer’s part of the work until his arrival so that the work chain is not affected and without directly reflecting on the service being rendered to customers. The supervisor should at the same time ensure that habitual late comers do not take undue advantage of the informal norm. He can develop positive norms by announcing rewards for exceeding nightly, weekly and monthly sales. The supervisor must act as a coach for the team and not as a commander so that the team members can feel that coach is part of their team and that he shares their task difficulties and more importantly understands and appreciates their involvement.( Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 ) Empowerment Empowerment of employees is desirable in order to make them feel committed. This is in effect enabling them to take decisions which otherwise are normally taken by the management. To make it possible, the employees should be encouraged to develop their skills and knowledge. Empowerment is also structural and flexible. By structural, it is meant that the employees have certain boundaries beyond the limits of which they can not decide. Flexible empowerment is giving them free hand with a view to give the guests an exemplary service. For example an employee is allowed to spend up to a certain amount say $ 1,000 without the concurrence of the manager to fix a customer’s problem. Thus in an incident in which the clothe got burnt while being pressed by the laundry, the employee took the customer to the garment shop to buy a new one using his own credit card. (Miller, Walker and Drummond, 2006 ) Conclusion The responsibility of team building exercise squarely rests on the supervisor who can not accomplish his objective unless he is an effective leader. The synergy created by the team work with the feeling of oneness is what the group dynamics is all about. Instead of letting groups being formed, the supervisor should endeavour to build teams which will acquire inherent strength for the hospitality organisation’s ultimate success for the services offered are perishable as mentioned at the outset. The perishable nature of the services make it imperative on the part of the supervisor to have effective teams under him in the industry that is subjected to high labour turnover. References Jones Peter and Andrew Lockwood, 2002, The Management of Hotel Operations :( an innovative approach to the study of hotel management), Cengage Learning EMEA Miller E. Jack, Walker R John, Drummond Erich Karen, 2006, Chapter 2 The Supervisor as Leader, Supervision in the Hospitality Industry: Applied Human Resources, Jon Wiley and Sons Wageman Ruth, 2001, in Turner E. Marlene 2001 Chapter 7 The Meaning of Interdependence, Groups at Work, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001, p 197 Read More