HOTO7016 Mentoring and Leadership Development Assignment Sample
Introduction
Kerala is known for bringing the best out in hospitality within India. This has happened because Kerala has created a benchmark by innovating and changing their patterns and inculcating fresh ideas and thoughts into their memorable experience. Hotel and other accommodation facilities are an integral part of the hospitality infrastructure of Kerala and are therefore very essential for the tourist development (Thimm, 2017).
Along with this, Kerala is also known for providing an affordable and clean place for staying and there are a couple of Vilas that are a never before opportunity to experience nature and its offerings at their best. The present report is based on the hospitality industry of Kerala and focuses on the contemporary challenge of innovative technology and use of social media.
The essay aims to highlight leadership theories that can be used to solve this challenge and also suggest ideas for enhancing organizational procedures while recognizing the textual limitations of the theories; concluding remarks have also been added. Within the present essay, leadership styles of laissez-faire and transformational are undertaken.
Critical Analysis
Discussion of Leadership Approaches
The organizations operating within the hospitality industry of Kerala are thriving to ensure that they are making the procedures as convenient as possible for their customers for accessing them and the services (Konovalova et al., 2018). This has clearly been witnessed in the increased use of websites which need to be up-to-date so that they could demonstrate the current happenings and cater to the trend.
A lot of studies show that use increment has been seen in the percentage of reservation that has been made by using internet platforms such as websites and other social media handles on an annual basis (Pham et al., 2019). This means that the operators and owners should make sure that they are creating and maintaining websites and other online platforms which can increase the overall cost of the operation but are also capable of providing numerous advantages.
In addition to this, use of social media platforms is also increasing and the organizations operating within the hospitality industry of Kerala should avoid any kind of incident that can bring negative deputation to their brand and business.
The hotel chains which have ventured globally should put themselves at the center of globalization within the industry (Hassi, 2019). The business arena of the globe is constantly evolving and the Kerala hospitality industry should come up with some solutions to address the changes as it expands its scope.
The use of social media also enables the organizations to interact and share their experiences with the customers and customers are also able to revert the same by writing reviews and providing feedback. According to the survey conducted by TripAdvisor, it has been found that around 93% of the customers feel that reviews are highly important when selecting the hotel to stay in. Around 53% of the people reported that they are highly unlikely to book a hotel without reading opinions and feedback of other guests (Frangos, 2015).
Hence, it can be said that user-generated content in the form of feedback and reviews are major decision-making factors for other customers. Positive reviews from satisfied customers and display that they are satisfied with the hotel and that it is a precious accommodation facility within Kerala. On the other hand, negative reviews display that the quality of service is low and that there is high scope of improvement.
Due to this reason a lot of players within the Kerala hospitality industry are building up a professional reputation management team that is directed towards tracking the reputation of the property across various internet platforms. The main challenge here is to determine when and how response should be given to the customers in case of negative feedback without creating a feeling of defending the entity against the consumer (Afsar et al., 2018).
In order to deal with this challenge transformational leadership style and laissez-faire leadership style can be implemented within the Kerala hospitality industry. As per the views of Huertas-Valdivia et al. (2019) transformational leadership is a situation where the leader inspires her or his followers with a particular vision and then encourages and empowers them to achieve it. In the process of achieving the goal a leader also acts as a role model.
Tran (2017) highlighted the key advantages of transformational leadership style, lower employee turnover rate and placing high value on achieving the corporate goal. In the current context, the corporate goal is to expand the presence of social media and regulate negative reviews so as to ensure that the brand reputation is not sacrificed. By using this leadership style, the leader would be able to give the due amount of attention and importance to the vision.
According to Solomon and Steyn (2017) by using transformational leadership style the leaders were driving change within the organization and can also increase the morale of the employees and used the same motivation and inspiration for gaining the valuable support from the employees in work as a team. It is not a coercive approach to leadership but it places a very high value on the interpersonal relationship between the leader and the team members.
This will enable the leader to bring innovative change of social media and monitoring reviews within the company effortlessly as he would have entire support of the team and they will also be willing to value relationships over any hurdles which they might face together.
On the contrary, Kara et al. (2018) stated that laissez faire leadership style is one of the most effective approaches while dealing with the changes and challenges in the organization.
It is also known as delegative leadership. It usually focuses on delegating various tasks to their team members as per their strengths. This is one of the most successful strategies when the team members are skillful and are capable of taking responsibilities while engaging with their members in doing individual work.
Laissez faire leadership style can only be hampered by this agreement that might take place between the members which can lead to division in bifurcation of a group because of low morale and reduced levels of motivation.
On the other hand, Cherry (2020) stated that the key advantages of laissez faire leadership style is that it enables the leaders to take advantage of skills and experience of the Talent pool of members. In the present context, it will enable the leaders within Kerala tourist industry to to maximize the potential of social media engagement and regulation of negative reviews while ensuring that positive reviews are also on floor by assigning tasks as per strengths and competence.
Laissez-faire as an approach values creativity and innovation while creating a positive work environment for inhibiting change (Tao et al., 2017). The leaders within Kerala hospitality industry would be able to cater to the demands of the contemporary hospitality challenge as they can accommodate the scope of innovation and creativity as far as social media and positive reviews are concerned.
This enables the leader to create an environment which fosters growth and allows the team members to extract complete potential out of their skills and experience while bringing change and fighting with issues within digital platforms and social media.
Berraies and Bchini (2019) explained that transformational leaders try to act as a role model for the team members and try to inspire and motivate them so as to meet the needs of the project. On the other hand, laissez faire leadership provides in the directions or path for the followers rather focuses on delegating the tasks and doesn’t participates in the operations of decision making.
Comparison and Contrast within the Leadership Approaches
The comparison between the selected leadership styles is clear. In one style the leader is everything and in the other the significance of the leader is only limited to delegation of tasks to the members as per their strengths and experience (Hansen and Pihl-Thingvad, 2019).
Apart from this, in transformational leadership major focus on interpersonal relationship between the leader and the followers is emphasized whereas the laissez-faire leadership relationship between the individual and the competence and experience is emphasized and undertaken for achieving the goal. It has been identified that laissez faire leadership is actually a complete lack of leadership when the followers don’t contact their leaders and neither are granted any kind of support.
On the contrary, a transformational leader has a charming personality and attracts everybody from his magnetism so that they can be encouraged and supported for meeting the personal as well as strategic goals of the organization (Alheet et al., 2021).
There are four main factors that develop transformational leadership within a work environment. One of the major factors is the charisma, magnetism, or idealized influence of the leaders that can be used to describe those individuals who have a compelling presence and are able to make the followers like himself (Hassi, 2019).
The key motive behind this is to achieve the goals on organizational and personal level. Another factor within the transformational leadership with that of inspirational motivation. This means that the leaders should provide incentives to their followers and team members so that they would participate in the achievement of the goal and convince them that their contribution is highly valuable and cannot be replaced.
Intellectual stimulation is also included within the transformational leadership style because it gives clarity about how leaders should incentivize their team members and challenge them to think outside the box (Elbaz and Haddoud, 2017). The key motive here is to give birth to create an expression and also support distinctive and unique ideas of the members in all the endeavours so as to meet objectives and goals. Lastly, the factor of individual consideration is also included for describing the attention required by the team members.
Leaders who are sympathetic and are able to extend an emotionally comfortable environment to the team members can foster an understanding atmosphere in the workplace. Laissez faire leadership is usually described as heads of team where decisions are left to the employees and accountability is in the hands of leaders. Many leaders are open and available to the group members in case they need any feedback for consultation (Book et al., 2019).
The key element of this leadership style is that it enables the employees to grow themselves on a personal level. This happens because the leaders are so hands-off within the style’s employees are given the chance to exercise their powers and activities as hands-on. Another element is that it encourages innovation. This happens because the freedom which is given to the Employees capable of fostering a creative environment which has led to innovation within the workplace.
Faster decision making is also an integral element of laissez-faire leadership style. This happens because there are no multiple levels of Management and employees are given full autonomy of making decisions on their own (Veliu et al., 2017).
That is why they are able to make quick decisions as we do not need to wait for approval from their seniors or any other monitoring authorities. In order to exercise all of these elements in the favor of the workplace it is necessary that your precondition should be fulfilled.
The team should be highly skilled and experienced so that they are capable of working their own without much supervision.
They should be found by working independently and capable of accomplishing goals with minimal guidance and should also have a high level of teamwork and collaborative skills so that interpersonal conflicts are minimized and hurdles to growth do not interfere.
An effective contrast between laissez faire leadership style and transformational leadership style can be witnessed. This is so because both of them are looking forward to achieving common goals on organization and personal level while contributing efforts and fostering creativity within the work environment (Popli and Rizvi, 2017).
By doing so they came to inform that the efforts made by the employees are highly valuable and essential for the team and the workplace to achieve its motive.
Both of them also Foster relationships in various variables but show that in order to achieve success it is necessary to develop valuable relationships in the workplace and maintain them for streamline progress.
In the hospitality industry of Kerala, both of these leadership styles can be implemented depending upon the requirements and the vision of the organization (Kaya and Karatepe, 2020).
Selection of Approach for Dealing with Challenges
In the opinion of the learner, transformational leadership style would be much more effective. This is so because monitoring negative reviews and expanding the use of social media is relatively new to the industry and it will be very hard to find a team that is already experienced within these operations to use laissez faire leadership style otherwise.
As the things would be relatively new, by using transformational leadership style the leader would also be able to give regular feedback and keep a check on the proceedings of the employees whether or not they are conducting the required operations.
This leadership style also aims to enhance the communication within the team members and the leader which further deliver the better results that are highly necessary in the current context for fighting the contemporary issue in the hospitality industry of Kerala.
Recommendations
By analyzing the contents of the essay following ideas are suggested for enhancing organizational processes. A leader-based position should be introduced in the organizations of hospitality industry within Kerala whose motor would be monitoring the social media platforms and blogs and also respond to the comments put up by the customers if they are appropriate.
This may create an additional cost expenditure for the industry but it is capable of solving the challenge and further creates the need of coming up with ways to meet these costs.
The Kerala hospitality industry should understand that the entire success of a single Hotel is dependent on its brand reputation and the feedback given by its previous guests.
Whenever new customers tend to book a property, they look for what people have to think and say about their experience at that particular place and impact of negative reviews or positive feedback is more impressive than it seems.
Apart from the leader-based position a few individuals can also be recruited for the particular task and they should develop a Hotel reputation management team. The scope of the team should not be limited to monitoring negative reviews or posting on social media but it should be made a vital part of the marketing mix of the brand sustaining within the Kerala hospitality industry.
Conclusion
From the present essay, it can be concluded that the scope of Kerala hospitality industry is continuously expanding but the major challenge faced with it is that of technological advancements and usage of social media platforms on a wide scale.
Leadership styles of transformational nature and laissez faire were assessed out of which transformational leadership was suggested to the Kerala hospitality industry in order to inhibit the changes of technological advancements, usage of social media platforms, and regulation of negative online reviews.
It has been recommended that the Hotel reputation management Team should be set up within the major players of the hospitality industry so as to ensure that brand reputation is not at stake as other customers make their booking decisions based on the feedback posted online.
References
Books and Journals
Afsar, B., Shahjehan, A. and Shah, S.I., 2018. Frontline employees’ high-performance work practices, trust in supervisor, job-embeddedness and turnover intentions in hospitality industry. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Alheet, A., Adwan, A., Areiqat, A., Zamil, A. and Saleh, M., 2021. The effect of leadership styles on employees’ innovative work behavior. Management Science Letters, 11(1), pp.239-246.
Berraies, S. and Bchini, B., 2019. Effect of leadership styles on financial performance: mediating roles of exploitative and exploratory innovations case of knowledge-intensive firms. International Journal of Innovation Management, 23(03), p.1950020.
Book, L., Gatling, A. and Kim, J., 2019. The effects of leadership satisfaction on employee engagement, loyalty, and retention in the hospitality industry. Journal of Human Resources in Hospitality & Tourism, 18(3), pp.368-393.
Elbaz, A.M. and Haddoud, M.Y., 2017. The role of wisdom leadership in increasing job performance: Evidence from the Egyptian tourism sector. Tourism management, 63, pp.66-76.
Hansen, J.A. and Pihl-Thingvad, S., 2019. Managing employee innovative behaviour through transformational and transactional leadership styles. Public Management Review, 21(6), pp.918-944.
Hassi, A., 2019. Empowering leadership and management innovation in the hospitality industry context. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Hassi, A., 2019. Empowering leadership and management innovation in the hospitality industry context. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Huertas-Valdivia, I., Gallego-Burín, A.R. and Lloréns-Montes, F.J., 2019. Effects of different leadership styles on hospitality workers. Tourism management, 71, pp.402-420.
Kara, D., Kim, H.L., Lee, G. and Uysal, M., 2018. The moderating effects of gender and income between leadership and quality of work life (QWL). International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Kaya, B. and Karatepe, O.M., 2020. Does servant leadership better explain work engagement, career satisfaction and adaptive performance than authentic leadership?. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Konovalova, E.E., Yudina, E.V., Bushueva, I.V., Uhina, T.V. and Lebedev, K.A.E., 2018. Forming approaches to strategic management and development of tourism and hospitality industry in the regions. Journal of Environmental Management & Tourism, 9(2 (26)), pp.241-247.
Pham, N.T., Tučková, Z. and Jabbour, C.J.C., 2019. Greening the hospitality industry: How do green human resource management practices influence organizational citizenship behavior in hotels? A mixed-methods study. Tourism Management, 72, pp.386-399.
Popli, S. and Rizvi, I.A., 2017. Leadership style and service orientation: The catalytic role of employee engagement. Journal of Service Theory and Practice.
Solomon, A. and Steyn, R., 2017. Leadership styles: The role of cultural intelligence. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 43(1), pp.1-12.
Tao, J., Jiang, W., Liu, C., Yang, X., Zhang, W. and Zhang, H., 2017. New employee intention to leave and consequent work performance: Does leadership style matter?. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 45(10), pp.1707-1721.
Thimm, T., 2017. The Kerala tourism model–An Indian state on the road to sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 25(1), pp.77-91.
Tran, X., 2017. Effects of leadership styles on hotel financial performance. Tourism and hospitality management, 23(2), pp.163-183.
Veliu, L., Manxhari, M., Demiri, V. and Jahaj, L., 2017. THE INFLUENCE OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON EMPLOYEE’S PERFORMANCE. Management (16487974), 31(2).
Online
Cherry, K., 2020. Pros and Cons of Laissez-Faire Leadership. [Online] Available Through <https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-laissez-faire-leadership-2795316> [Accessed on 14th April 2021]
Frangos, N., 2015. The 4CI’s (Contemporary Issues) in the Hospitality Industry. [Online] Available Through <https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4071106.html> [Accessed on 14th April 2021]
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