Situational Leadership in Hospitality
If one look at the nature of the hospitality industry, it is serviced-base, it is labor-intensive, it is renowned for its high staff turnover and labor diversity in term of age, culture, and background; one may conclude that the industry is all about people. When people become the most valuable asset of an organization, simply managing them is no longer sufficient to compete in today’s challenging business world. Leadership has become the new key operative word, (Testa, 2001) and is seen as critical to organizational long-term wellbeing (Whitelaw and Morda, 2004). Among all leadership theories, methods or styles, situational leadership is one of the most widely known and used techniques (Blank et al, 1990). The question raise in this paper is where situational leadership applies in a hospitality organization.
To understand situational leadership, one should first define leadership. A common view that all leadership definitions share is that leadership is a process of influencing others. (Vroom & Jago 2007) The word ‘process’ is most crucial, as leadership is not something possessed by a leader, but something a leader attempt to do. Furthermore, in an organizational environment, leadership become the ability to influence and motivate staff to contribute towards organizational goals (House et al, 2004)
For instance, in hospitality industry, leadership can be a general manager trying to lead all hotel staff to provide better customer service, or a banquet supervisor trying to lead food and beverage attendants to host a dinner party, or an experienced staff trying to lead a new comer towards better working performance. Leadership lies in everyone, and can be practiced in all organizational level, not necessarily ...