Defining Leadership in Hospitality, Essay Example

Leadership is a highly studied topic among behavioral scientists that focus on management and organizational behavior.  Every type of organization including the many different organizations in the hospitality industry, require some form of leadership to provide guidance and support to every member of the team or organization.  Leaders possess specific traits and abilities that are crucial to the situation in which they have been called upon to lead a group of individuals into action.  Through this understanding, it is important to define leadership and examine how it relates to the organizational behavior within a company or organization that exists within the hospitality industry in an attempt to discover what traits or tools are necessary to help the organization become successful.

There are many different definitions of leadership that scientists and organizational management experts have used to explain its importance as a tool within multiple industries. According to McCrimmon, there are three highly popular ways of defining leadership that all maintain a slightly different perspective on the requirements of a leader and the skills necessary to perform leadership activities (par. 1). The first definition states that leadership means being the dominant individual within a group of people. We can see this definition at work in many animal species and primitive tribes in South America and southern Africa.  “Being the leader simply means having the power to attain and hold the top position for a reasonable length of time” (McCrimmon par. 2).  This definition does not imply that the leader actually has to get anything done or have any real accomplishments.  People are subordinate to the leader only because he or she holds more power than they do.  Therefore, leaders under this definition hold their position as long as someone else does not challenge their power or the society does not engage in an all-out revolution to overthrow the leader.  According to this definition, the meaning of leadership is only to be the person with the most power and to make people recognize your authority through any action necessary. This could mean helping the people or it could mean just sitting back and letting people fend for themselves, as long as the leader is recognized as the most powerful person of the organization.
As society shifted and the definition of leadership evolved, this brought about a secondary definition of leadership that is most commonly used by organizational behavior professionals today.  The second definition of leadership states that leadership is the ability for a person or group of people to get things done through other people (McCrimmon par. 3). Typically, this definition stems from the areas of business and from management professionals where studies were performed to analyze how best to achieve the desired results as efficiently as possible. In this sense, the leader is considered a great motivator, organizer, and is directly responsible for getting things done.  Within this context, leaders are usually defined by their roles such as a hospitality administrator or a coordinator of a specific hospitality operation.  Leaders are responsible to the organization for fulfilling achievements and accomplishing various tasks through other people.

Similarly, each leader has a specific style that they use to coax or motivate people to helping fulfill the organization’s achievements.  First of all, a leader can be the all-inspiring figurehead that promotes production and acts as a ‘cheerleader’ to help people feel good about the tasks they are doing.  Another form of motivation can come in providing benefits and rewards for individuals that perform duties within a specific time frame or excel within the tasks given to them.  This concept is usually explained by the term “empowerment” that helps take the power from belonging solely to the leader, and helping the common person to experience a little bit of power through rewards or earned benefits.  One study explored multiple factors of empowerment and analyzed how they impacted employees’ performance within a hospitality organization.  “From the data found, investments in efforts to foster psychological empowerment among hospitality employees seem worthwhile as satisfaction with promotion opportunities should rise, and turnover intentions decrease” (Sparrowe 51).  In other words, this study shows that empowerment is a very useful tool that allows hospitality employees and staff members to feel that their accomplishments are worthwhile and to remain motivated to perform the tasks more so than without empowerment.

While many people are motivational or influential leaders, other leaders are similar to the first definition, where they use their power and authority to threaten or intimidate their subservient counterparts.  In this scenario, people perform their duties because they are afraid of being publicly ridiculed, demoted, or put down by the leader.  Within this sense, leaders are people that have typically shown a tendency to excel in production, organization and have various skills that are stereotypically viewed as existing in leaders.  Leaders must be able to take charge, have phenomenal organizational skills and be able to use their personalities to help motivate, through intimidation or positive reinforcement.  Unfortunately, this means that not all people have the essential capabilities to become a leader and despite exciting innovations and achievements, may not be a leader under the two previous definitions of leadership.

However, the third definition that organizational behavior professionals have suggested is that leadership is not a matter of getting things done or holding a position of power, but leadership is the ability for a person to challenge the status quo and to promote a better way for accomplishing things.  Many of history’s most important leadership figures have done many great things to enact change in our society, in our government, and in the way we do things.  At times, leaders perform these actions at risk to themselves and can be punished for their will to buck the authority and the normal way of doing things.  People do not tend to appreciate change unless they can see the clear benefits, which is rarely the case.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy are two of the most prominent figureheads that experienced the ultimate risk, the loss of their lives, for working to enact change within our society and the way we think, act, and feel.  “However, and this is the whole point here, if you think through what it means to challenge the status quo or advocate change, there is no necessary implication that you have to be in charge of the people you are trying to influence” (McCrimmon).  This definition of leadership does not exclude anyone from having the ability to lead; therefore, there are no definite characteristics that can enable people to be leaders and there is not a genetic coding for leaders and followers.  All people have to do to lead is to work to change the system and challenge the status quo.  In this scenario, people no longer have to have a dominant personality or exceptional skill sets, they only need to be able to support changing the status quo.  Bill Gates does not have a very exciting personality or have a physical presence that demands he is the top dog in the company.  Instead, his achievements that helped change the status quo forced people to view him as an industrial leader and innovator.  Now, when he talks, people listen and he can lead hundreds of thousands of people to perform actions or think a certain way without intimidating or motivating anyone directly.  “Strictly, speaking there are no longer any leaders, only leadership. This view captures the fact that leadership is a fleeting state that can shift quickly from one person to another.  It is an impact rather than a type of person or position” (McCrimmon par. 5).

Under the first two definitions of leadership, problems arise when leaders can no longer motivate or organize people in ways that make achievements possible or make them as efficient as possible.  If people start to doubt the leader, he or she loses some or all of their power and authority and no longer has the capability to accomplish even the smallest of tasks through other people.  “Recognizing that CEOs no longer have all the answers … leadership now means … drawing ideas for new directions out of your best people.  This move preserves the myth that the CEO is the leader, but the cost is that leaders no longer provide direction” (LeadersDirect.com par. 4).  These problems and advanced definitions of leadership require that people in the hospitality industry understand that there is no precise definition of leadership.  Leadership can mean many different things, and is not exclusive to a particular job title or position.  However, if a specific definition were to be devised it would state that leadership is the ability or presence of power that an individual or group of individuals can contain to persuade people to accomplish tasks or work to change the current status quo.  Within hospitality, the positional leaders are responsible for running a business and making sure that every task is performed correctly for the business to excel.  Therefore, hospitality administrators act within the first two definitions of management and must be strong organizers, motivators and focus on results-based actions.  They can utilize empowerment or positive reinforcement methods or they may use intimidation and threats to force people to perform their required tasks in an appropriate manner. On the other hand, non-positional leaders that seek to change the status quo are responsible only for working to advance the current situation and make the overall scenario better and more efficient.

Every person within a hospitality organization can become a leader in one way or another.  The definition of leadership has expanded many times, and most recently it has eliminated the requirement for a person to have specific skill sets or a position of power to become a leader within the organization.  Individuals that hold these positions of power may not be the most knowledgeable people to perform tasks or may lose the respect of the people underneath them.  Therefore, it is important to think of leadership within the proposed definition as the capability of a person to enact change of the status quo, no matter how big or small that change may be.  This definition is very important for people within the hospitality industry because the definitions of leadership vary and people should no longer view leadership within the confines of a restricting viewpoint.  No person is exempt from being able to lead others.

References

Hinkin, Timothy R., and J. Bruce Tracey. “Transformational Leadership in the Hospitality Industry.” Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research 18.1 (1994): 49-63.

LeadersDirect.com. “What is leadership?” Leaders Direct. Web. 08 Oct. 2009. <http://www.leadersdirect.com/leadership.html>.

McCrimmon, Mitch. “Three Ways of Defining Leadership.” Leadersdirect Thinking. 30 Sept. 2008. Web. 08 Oct. 2009. <http://www.leadersdirect.net/articles/533/1/Three-Ways-of-Defining-Leadership/Page1.html>.

Sparrowe, Raymond T. “Empowerment in the Hospitality Industry: an Exploration of Antecedents and Outcomes.” Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research 17.3 (1994): 51-73.