RESEARCH PAPER 1

Leadership and managerial effectiveness in the hospitality industry

Mintzberg's approach to managerial behaviour was adopted by Arnaldo (1981) in a survey of the
hotel's general manager. The results of this survey show that hotel managers consider leadership to
be the most important and time-consuming. Given the relatively autonomous nature of the hotel,
the well-known of the hotel's general manager and the high personality of the industry. Despite the
implicit importance of hotel manager leadership from these results, the issue of leadership in the
hospitality industry has received little attention as a topic of research. This paper presents a review
of leadership theory particularly relevant to research in the hotel and catering industry.

The image of the hospitality industry as catering to people with a need for good interpersonal
relationships. These results are supported by those obtained from personality inventories of the
same sample of hotel managers which indicate that these managers care about people and will have
a good relationship with them, are sociable and communicative and must be able to influence and
motivate their employees. At the same time, in hospitality there is a need to maintain high standards
in a highly variable environment with a short time product. Maintaining these standards requires
establishing rules and procedures that employees adhere to. This necessity may explain the need for
effective hotel managers to have a high level of initiating structure.

The interview question on leadership style did not yield any clear indication of the "most effective
leadership style". Identified styles ranged from "autocratic" to "rather calm" to "charismatic". In a
survey of managers in the hospitality industry, Keegan found that managers described leadership as
"the ability to stimulate people to understand what they should be doing and to be motivated to
stimulate it.”. It was clear from this study that managers were aware of the need for a more human-
centric leadership style. Keegan advocates the adoption of a more participatory leadership style by
managers in the hospitality industry. It was clear from the decision-making questions that none had
adopted a participatory style. Although the leadership style was described in terms of "open" and
"calm", there was an underlying "autocratic" element.

When asked about risk-taking, all managers cited the need to take risks as an unavoidable element
of hotel management. LOQ scores found that supervisors who perform well on deliberation and
start-up structure tend to take higher risks than their peers and shift group decisions in a risky
direction.

This conclusion is supported by the work of White which found that the management style of most
hotel managers was perceived as autocratic. The balance seen between consideration and initiating
structure and the interview analysis which identifies an autocratic style with consultative overtones,
both suggest that managers in this study might be perceived as benevolent autocrats.

There it appears, a disagreement for supervisors in the friendliness business; it is the dispute of
working in a character serious industry with the prerequisite to lay out an inflexible arrangement of
rules and guidelines for the support of principles. Apparently, this argument might be settled by
powerful administrators utilizing a mix of choice centralization and starting design, the two of which
are OK a result of their high levels of consideration.