The Importance Of Diversity For Hospitality Managers Tourism Essay
The hospitality management is on the basis of management Therefore, hospitality managers need to learn more knowledge concerning the management. In the modern hospitality management, the managers need to embrace diversity as an important aspect. Modern hospitality has diverse customers and the demands of customers are different. As a result, the hotel should not only meet the needs of the guests room and board, but also provide a wide range of services and facilities to meet the various needs of customers so that they are spiritual and material satisfaction and enjoyment. In addition, the diversity in the hospitality is also reflected in the creation of economic benefits and social benefits. The importance of diversity in the hospitality can be discussed from three aspects.
Firstly, the nature of hospitality needs the diversity. There are many departments in the hotels, including housekeeping department, marketing department, human resources, finance and other different departments. Good hospitality management should link each department well. Under this circumstance, diversity is rather important. The hotel aims at providing the services to the customers. In order to offer good service, each department should cooperate with each other. Under this circumstance, knowing single management knowledge is not enough. Diversity becomes even necessary in the hospitality management. Modern hospitality itself is an organic integration. The hospitality operation and management activities need to study the hotel’s overall objective, the overall function and overall effectiveness. (Delman, 2000) At the same time, hospitality management should make the composition of the various elements of the hotel to adapt to the overall needs. The overall objective of the modern hotel is composed by the comprehensive elements. The modern hotel’s overall function is the result of coordination of these elements. The overall effect of a modern hotel is generated in their mutual relations within various elements. Hospitality managers should consider the overall interests of the hotel and give full play to the hotel’s human, material and financial resources and the role of information. This all needs the diversity knowledge of hospitality management.
Secondly, cultural difference in the hospitality management also requires the diversity. In the modern hospitality operation and management, there is not only reception for domestic customers, but also a large number of receptions for foreign guests. Therefore, modern hospitality management has a foreign-related feature. The hospitality management should be based on different countries and different ethnic group habits. Then hospitality managers should arrange a variety of services to meet the needs of foreign guests. At the same time, hotel managers and staffs need to implement their own policies on external environment and do the service work well. All of these work needs to be established on the diversity. At the same time, cultural difference usually has the misunderstanding. In order to serve foreign customers well, it is important for hospitality managers to learn the diversity.
Thirdly, diversity is also necessary for the system management in the hospitality.
Modern hotel is an independent economic entity, which is a comprehensive and holistic system. From the system engineering point of view, modern hospitality system management mainly includes system analysis, evaluation of the hotel, the hotel organization and management system, hotel program management systems and hotel management control systems and other management content. All of these management contents are different with each other, but they are all necessary parts for the hospitality management. The hospitality managers should learn the diversity to adapt to different management modes. Effecting by the diversity, hospitality managers could learn more management ways and improve the quality of hospitality management.
Explain Hofstede’s Cultural Framework, what is it all about. Choose a culture within your business and discuss where the cultural group rates and compare with the Australian rating.
Cultural framework is put forward by Greet Hofstede, who is superintendent of the Netherlands Institute of International Cultural Cooperation, Hofstede and his colleagues adopted this concept in the study of quantitative research on cultural factors. In 1980, Hofstede made a survey on 117,000 IBM staffs in 66 countries, which is based on the value of the work. Then Hofstede developed a culture that is based on the four frameworks of Western culture, including individualism and collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity / femininity. (Kealey, 2003)
Individualism and collectivism indicates that the relationship between individual and group level. Individualistic culture focuses on individual goals. On the contrary, collectivist culture emphasizes more on collective goals. In the individualistic culture, people should take care of themselves and immediate family. While in the collectivist cultures, people expect their collective within the group to take care of them, In exchange for such care, they have absolute loyalty to domestic groups. For individualism, there is not the significant between in-group and out-group. But for collectivism, there is significant difference between in-group and out-group.
In the organization or institution, it usually has the fact that members have less power or unequal distribution of power. Power distance refers to the acceptance of people on this fact. Cultural members with strong power see the power as social basic factions. They emphasize on the mandatory and prescriptive power. In opposite, cultural members with weak power think that the adoption of power should be complied with the laws. They attach more importance to the experts and legitimacy.
Uncertainty avoidance denotes that people’s uncertainty attitude about the future. (Davis, 2000) The degree of strong uncertainty avoidance culture tends to have a clear social norms and principles to guide almost all cases that the behavior occurs. However, weaker uncertainty avoidance culture is not so clear and strict with social norms and principles.
Masculinity / femininity means that people’s awareness on how to distribute the social roles of men and women. Masculine-oriented society has a clear division of gender roles. The roles of feminine gender are overlapped. The cultural members of masculine society praise the achievements, ambition, material, power and determination. While cultural members of the feminine society emphasize on the cultural life of quality, service, caring and nurturing future generations.
It will choose receptionist business in the hotel to discuss what the cultural group rates. Different countries have different culture. It will compare Germany hospitality culture and Australian hospitality culture. In German business, cultural group rate is not very large. But people should also learn the German culture in the hospitality management. Germans value personal space, having clear boundaries of work and life. (Judith, 2007) Germans are proud of their achievements and attach more importance on their identities. The investigation of cross-cultural in Germany finally aims to examine the acceptable or unacceptable communication practices if investing business in Germany. As the receptionists, they would better service the customers as their culture. For example, the receptionist should call the customers plus their title if they know. Or the receptionists could recommend the food which is welcome by Germans to customers. The decoration of hotel could be designed according to the colour which Germans like and so on. However, the receptionist must remember what taboos are for Germans. So they do not give the customers room number 13, or the customers will feel very angry. (Chinua, 2007)
Australia is a country which has large population of immigration. So the cultural group rate is high. Therefore, as hospitality managers in Australia, they should learn more knowledge concerning the cultural aspects. Australia has also many travel sites for people all over the world. As the receptionists, they must learn the cross-cultural communication with the customers. For example, Australians like living in the sun shine. As a result, receptionist should choose the rooms towards the sun for customers who come from the Australians. Every year, there are many travellers who come from different countries to Australia. As a result, in the busy reason, the hospitality managers could train the receptionists for some cultural knowledge. Then the receptionists can overcome the barriers in the cross-cultural communication.
Consequently, compared with Germany, Australian hospitality business has higher cultural group rate because more foreigners travel to Australia every year. In order to leave a good image the Australian hospital business has to pay more attention on the cultural group rate.
Explain four strategies managers can use to address diversity issues in the workplace. One of these should be a strategy for monitoring staff performance with a staff diversity mix.
The first strategy is that hospitality managers can implement SOP for the staffs.
The so-called SOP is short for Standard Operation Procedure. That is to describe a uniform format for the standard operating procedures and requirements of an event, in order to guide and regulate the daily work. (Allen, 2004) The essence of SOP is to quantify the details. For the hospitality industry, it should focus on implementation of SOP development and facilities more carefully. The hotel aims at providing high-level service to the customers. Then the hospitality managers need to build SOP to let the staffs comply with. In this situation, the whole hotel can form a completed order and then the service quality can be improved. For the diversity, as long as staffs comply with the SOP, the service can also keep unified. Then it can avoid the mistakes which are caused by the diversity effectively.
In another aspect, setting up SOP can achieve the objective of monitoring staff performance with a staff diversity mix. SOP can be recognized as the standards to monitor and evaluate the staff performance. Meanwhile, the staffs can refer the SOP to evaluate their own performance. Hospitality managers could monitor the staff performance through comparing the staffs’ actual actions with SOP. Then the staffs can amend the disadvantages in the workplace and make improvement continuously.
The second strategy to address the diversity issues is to deal with the cultural difference in the hospitality management. The base of dealing with the cultural difference is to learn more about the culture from other countries. As a result, the hospitality managers should train the staffs for the cross-cultural communication. Cross-cultural business communication requires not only appropriate language, but also calls for the appropriate non-verbal behavior. (Hampden, 2001) Nonverbal communication refers to the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless messages, such as facial expression, tones of voice, gestures, and eye contact. It also has an important effect in the hospitality management. Sometimes it is more powerful than verbal communication. However, different gestures have different meaning. Of course, different countries have different meanings of nonverbal communication. Sometimes under different background of culture, even the same gesture or emotion has different meaning for different people. Thus, in a hospitality industry, it is rather useful to have an understanding about basic nonverbal communicative skills. The hospitality managers should focus on this point and then the diversity could be addressed more effectively.
The third strategy to address the diversity issues is to adopt IT system in the hospitality management. IT system is conductive to provide the feedback and assist the hotel’s decision-making planning. The IT system can provide a wide range of information, such as the guest’s hometown, gender, occupation, its causes and other information. The IT system could help the hotel to publicize the brand image. Meanwhile, the hotel could offer the update network service to give the convenience. At the same time, the hotel can learn the new Internet information. IT system can offer the high efficient and convenient service to the customers. (Shelly, 2009) Under this circumstance, the diversity can be dealt with better with the effect of IT system.
The fourth strategy to address the diversity issues is to make sure the resource management in the hospitality industry. Modern hospitality resource management has wide coverage. It contains modern hospitality human resource management, financial resource management, materials resource management and hotel image. These resource managements link with each other. The assurance of resource management could effectively explore the resources and avoid the barriers which the diversity brings in the hospitality management. In a word, resource management can address the diversity issues in the hospitality management.
