Supervision in Hospitality Management - Assignment Example

Topic 1 1 First is the owner and senior manager who must ensure that the enterprise earns profit as the owner has risked investing his money expecting a reasonable return. Second, the customer should be served in such a way that he feels like a guest at the hotel or restaurant. Third, the employees as only if they are well treated, they can keep the guest happy and make him a returning customer. 2 Most important are the employees. If they are looked after in the right way, they make customers satisfied. The returning customers ensure adequate return on investment to the owner. 3 Scientific management believes in standardization of work, constant overseeing of the workers, ensuring obedience and giving incentives for achieving fair day’s work. Standardization of work involves the work being simplified by removal of wasteful repetitions and unnecessary movement and division of labour. This rendered workers as mere tools as they felt wok as monotonous having lost their craftsman’s style of working. Although out put increased by this scientific method, workers could not tolerate monotony and slavery and this resulted in their sabotaging the machinery and work. Human relations theory advocates the treatment of workers in a more honourable way than as a production tool. It aims to motivate workers to achieve their individual desires and also make them participate in management. If workers are motivated by encouraging them to make initiatives wherever possible, they are made to feel important and part of the management. Humanistic management combines the positive aspects of scientific, humanistic and participative management systems. Topic 2 1In situational theory, leaders adopt their functioning depending on workers’ degree of performance in a particular situation, whereas transactional leaders motivate their workers and achieve their performance by clarifying their role and task required of them. Autocratic style unlike in the above two, true to its name imposes conforming to commands. 2 Culture, race, religion, language, ethinicty, geneder, sexual orientation and physical abilities coming into play make the work environment diverse. Recognizing this diversity is important in order to ensure equality and human dignity in the workplace. This is unavoidable since population around world is becoming multicultural in any given country thus rendering cross-cultural point of view important. 3 It is shrewd to take diversity as an opportunity instead of as a challenge. This diversity contributes to knowledge in diverse fields and experience thus gained helps management solve problems. Cross-cultural interaction skills are developed consciously by building diverse teams with diverse knowledge and experiences and make the employees better equipped. Topic 3 1 Two or more people are brought together with complementary skills and abilities to achieve a common purpose of achieving goals for which team members are made mutually accountable.Top performers are identified and made team captains since people would like to be associated with individuals who excel in their jobs. 2. A team in order to perform should have a purpose. Team members must be sufficiently empowered. There should be informal relationships amongst the members and communication amongst them must flow vertically and horizontally. It should also flow from the top to bottom levels. Seamless communication is the secret of the team’s success. There should be flexibility so as to enable team members adapt to situations. The team members should understand the goal of the team and remain committed to them besides to the mission and vision of the enterprise. The team members must be mature enough to understand what they are expected of and must be amenable to continual improvement to create synergy. There must be mutual respect among the members and they should listen to each other and must feel free to express their opinions. The differences of opinions should be rather handled in a professional manner than in a hawkish manner. 3 Teams of are perpetual in nature in that there can be sales team, customer relations team, kitchen team etc. The team leader coordinates the chain of work carried out by the team members. Topic 4 1 Barriers to communication in a hospitality organisation can lead to poor customer relations and poor employee relations that will ultimately tell upon the organisational performance. The chain of command and unity of command should be in perfect order in order to minimise communication barriers. A certain amount of grapevine can also be encouraged. 2 The desirable personality should be characterized by extroversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Extroversion calls for the attitude to express feelings and opinions openly without suppressing them internally. At the same time, the member should possess the agreeableness without being dogmatic if there is consensus otherwise. Topic 5 1 P.M. system enables employee to understand whether he meets with the performance standards set for a given job position. The system defines performance expected of the employee in his respective position. This definition enables measurement of performance and giving feed back on the performance both to the employee and the management. 2 The job description consists of nature of the job, title i.e name of the job position, wages for the job, and what the employees’ duties are. It describes fair day’s work and sets the performance standards. The job description which should be given to the employee is important to avoid ambiguity and to serve as evidence in employment disputes. 3Performance appraisal is the method of evaluating performance of employee in a systematic manner. Purpose is to evaluate performance and give recognition. A performance appraisal form is used to do this exercise. The form has the list of performance criteria in terms of dimensions and categories. By dimension, the job performance clearly defines in objective and measurable terms. In other words, it results in job rating. Point values are assigned to each performance dimension. The evaluation form must be carefully filed to render it useful. It is important because, the exercise also tests the correctness of the system. If workers are found to meet all the standards, then standard prescribed by the system are deemed to be in order. It confirms that standards and procedures are pragmatic and achievable. It should be noted that it is performance that is being evaluated and not the employee. The appraisal must be objective. 4 Performance depends on the customer feed back and changes in volume of revenue. Service is not easily measurable unlike in the case of a tangible product. Customer rating is likely to be mostly subjective and emotional. The guests visiting the hotels and restaurants come for different purposes such as serious business meetings or spending the leisure time. A careful employee will identify the purpose of the guest’s visit and accordingly adapt his behaviour and attitude. The systems of performance measure can fail due to poorly defined and communicated standard. Sometimes the supervisor himself may happen to do a poor job. Topic 6 1. In order for work environment to be qualitative or positive, job design, systems and co-workers must be conducive for the worker to perform. It also depends on the organizational culture, employee attitude and behaviours and organizational outcomes. Encouraging formation of informal groups will also prompt workers to take initiatives themselves to solve problems. 2 Rewards in the forms of mostly monetary benefits are useful to identify the top performers so that they feel recognised and honoured. The reward system prompts other employees who have performed less to emulate the top performers. This results not only in self actualisation by the employee but also the industry maximising its overall performance in the market. Standard benefits legally provided are minimum bonus that should be given to the employees even if there is loss and a higher bonus if the industry earns substantial profits. Thus the prospect of higher bonus encourages workers to perform responsibly. Rewards are voluntarily given by the industry to recognise extraordinary performers and teams. 3 In Masolow’s hierarchy of needs an employee is deemed to be motivated according to his needs. First his physiological needs are to be satisfied, and then his safety needs, social needs, ego needs and self-actualisation. The first three are lower order needs and the last two are higher order needs. 4 It points out that inadequacies in the job environment leads to dissatisfaction. Certain hygiene factors such as scale of pay, supervision, working conditions and company policies act as motivational factors. It is also known as two factor theory because of satisfier factors and hygiene factors present in it. 5 Employee turnover in the hospitality industry is high because of poor wages and stigma attached to it. Most of the workers come from student population as part-time workers. The turnover can be reduced by careful employee selection who want long term career by offering them conducive work environment and attractive incentives. 6 Theory X assumes that people have inherent dislike of work. That they do not have ambition and are mostly irresponsible. That they do not want to lead and rather like to be led and they have inherent resistance to change. On the other hand, theory Y thinks that people love working, having self control, willingly take responsibilities, be self-directed besides being imaginative and creative. The assumptions of theory Y help alignment of employee goals with that of the organisation. Although theory X also is a realty, theory Y’s assumptions enable formulation of motivational and reward policies to achieve employee performance and organisation goals. Topic 7 1 Coaching, mentoring and counselling are directed towards employees to improve their performance. Coaching is given by a person of equal status and hence the coach does not use authoritative methods in coaching. He gives moral support and uses positive energy. He inspires his team by delegating, challenging and inspiring the team members. On the other hand, a mentor is a leader and acts as a role model and a teacher to the employee under him for mentoring. In counselling, employees are taken into confidence and told of their inadequacies in their job and given possible solutions and the employer and employee agree on a course of action. 2. Coaching instils a sense of team work. When the coach exhorts employees on development and improvement, they tend to be more comfortable and more communicative without having anxieties. In mentoring, the person is being mentored get individualized attention. Mentors give employees constructive feed back and advice on the actions they take on their products or services. They also give them informal or formal instruction on both technical instructions so that they can improve their jobs performance. Counselling as already seen is part of job evaluation in which the employee is counselled to improve up on his short comings if any. The above obviously help reduce employee turnover ratio. But it also can heighten the ratio if the employer resorts to these methods when the employees are part timers and merely take up jobs for the time being. Topic 8 1 Employee empowerment enables even distribution of decision making power throughout an organisation. This policy authorises to find solution themselves within a certain frame work. 2 Employee empowerment is important because it gives a sense of participation and also leads to better service quality, improved customer satisfaction, better customer relations, employee satisfaction and a healthier decision making to improve the overall organisational performance. Although employee empowerment is an ideal way of improvement at all levels, it is rarely practiced in the real sense and restricted only to the matters of day to day operations, communication between employees and management and among employees. In spite of its good intentions, the employees do not have a say in the matters of their pay, work conditions, disciplinary matters and dismissals. As an example of empowerment, an employee being offered to give discount to the customer in case of any complaint regarding a/c functioning in his room or any other perceptible or obvious deficiency in service. Another example, empowering employee to use his own credit card to be reimbursed later by offering customer to replace his burnt shirt while pressing. Instances of employee empowerment are found only to use his discretion in emergencies when facing an embarrassing situation with customers. If only empowerment is pursued logically, it can lead to better organisational performance and reduce high employee attrition ratio. 3 In reality, one can not do all the work by himself. Although he is responsible for over all performance, he delegates a portion of his work and authority to his subordinate to carry out the work on his behalf. When it comes to delegation, questions of responsibility, authority and accountability arise. Hence when an employee is given the responsibility to carry out a work, he is also given the authority. Generally delegation of authority comes with responsibility. One can not simply be authorised to do an act without responsibility. He is made accountable for what he has done with the authority he has exercised. This delegation principle that is inevitable in an organisation can be perceived through an organisation chart which shows the lines of responsibility and authority therein. The chart shows who is responsible at what level. The presence of the delegation helps formulate performance appraisal systems. Bibliography Miller E. Jack, Walker R. John, Drummond Eich Karen, (2006) ,Supervision in the Hospitality Industry applies human resources, fifth edition, John Wiley & Sons, Canada. Read More