The Managerial Role- the Hershey Hotel, Research Paper Example

Introduction

Leadership of an organization is what determines its performance, its financial ability, and its potentiality (Steers, Mowday, and Shapiro 381). Of interest, in this paper is leadership at the Hershey hotel.  The Hershey hotel is an American landmark hotel. It is the best place to be on earth, and its outstanding progress raises a topic of interest. Brian R. O’ Day is the key personnel over the management of the Hotel Hershey. He has served as the general manager at the Hershey since April 4 2003. Brian has a vast experience of more than three decades serving in the hospitality industry both at the Traditional Golf Properties, and at Williamsburg in the Williamsburg’s Two Rivers Country Club.  He has the “power” to make things happen or not, he has the ability to motivate and influence employees to work hard towards achieving a given organizational goal. This paper focuses on discussing the “magic” that Brian employs in his leadership role at the Hershey hotel.

General Background and Responsibilities
Leadership is a process of playing an integral role in an organization, where the leader is the instructor. The leader is answerable to all underlying organizational activities. Brian role as a manager explains the perfect interaction that exists amongst Hershey’s individual employees. Members who are directly or indirectly involved with the organization have extremely high expectations from the leader, and he has certainly attained this.  What Brian R. O’ Day likes most about his managerial role is the positive outcomes; the Hershey becoming outstanding, its growth and expansion, and above all level of employee satisfaction. He experiences challenges from managers of competitor companies, whereby they suspect him on irregularities, something he likes least, but this has acted as a stepping-stone towards proving them wrong.

Managing Employees

In the aim of making the Hershey hotel the best, Brian R. O’ Day has worked towards ensuring the employees work on the best environment ever. He is dedicated towards one selection, acknowledgment, development and advancement. He works towards motivating committed employees who work towards the excellence and legacy the Hershey hotel. His employ managerial role splits into three: Creating satisfied employees, Motivating employees, and Leading employees.

Creating satisfied employees

Employee satisfaction is the positive or negative altitude of employees regarding their job. Brian R. O’ Day of the Hershey Entertainment & Resorts centre commits himself towards creating workforce diversity. This enhances the establishment and maintenance of a stimulating and satisfying work environment.  All employees feel valued, with all their strengths, weaknesses, and differences taken into consideration. Brian employs the following facts that created satisfaction in employees:

• Full appreciation of work that is perfectly done
• Taking time to listen to personal problems, and provision of sympathetic help
• Ensuring that there is job security for all Hershey hotel employs
• Ensuring satisfying compensation in terms of good wages and salaries
• Ensuring specialization of work, where one works on the field he is most competent and interested in
• Enforcing promotion and growth  of potential employees, more especially those with vast work experience
• Ensuring employees loyalty
• Provision of peaceful working conditions
• Enforcing tactful discipline to those bleaching company rules and regulations
• Ensuring gender equality where both gender (female and male) are given equal priorities to rule, take part in decision making and participate equally in all works that pertain the functioning of the organization

Motivating employees

Motivation involves all activities that activates and directs human behavior towards the achievement of a particular goal (Basset-Jones and Lloyd 62). Processes that play a role in arousing directing and maintaining human behavior positively are all motivators.  At the Hershey hotel, Brian R. O’ Day has employed several tactics that motivates their employees. He ensures that a positively cultured behavior needs energizing, direction, and sustenance. Brian R. O’ Day focuses on three major approaches; organizations processes, organizations structure, and organizations behavior. The approaches that Brian R. O’ Day employs at the Hershey hotel include:

• Financial motivation: money is a very powerful tool in providing a conditioned reinforcement. A small incentive on top of the usual salaries and wages has the power to satisfy needs, power to reduce anxiety, and the power to erase the feelings of dissatisfaction.
• Individual Performance motivation: when an employee performing outstandingly, or does something successfully, then this is not taken literary. This employee obtains a reward, and this acts as a motivational aspect that motivates the rest of the employees to perform also.
• Company performance and return motivation: companies have targets that are set at the beginning of a financial year. Whenever Hershey hotel attains its annual target, there are motivation rewards to employees with respect to the role they played towards attainment of the goal. This enforces the employees to work even harder in the year to come.

Leading employees

There is a big difference between a leader and a ruler, which most managers fail to understand. A leader is simply a director, who gives directions while the other employees too have a chance to pass on their views. On the other hand, a ruler is a dictator; he says what to do and what not to, while employees having no say (Whittington and Evans 120). In the Hershey hotel, Brian R. O’ Day is more of a leader. He employs various strategies in leading his employs:

The Organizational strategy: Brian R. O’ Day insists on the complete understanding of the mission, vision and goals of organization by every employee. All employees have the obligation of working along the mission, vision and goal achievement of the organization without follow-up. There is a necessity of proper co-ordination, with default environmental factors, which influence the workability of employees within the organization.

Economic efficiency strategy: This unique strategy places every employee on his toes. There is subjection of all employees to a mental state of the economic condition at hand.  Every amount of waste and “friction” towards the undesirable economic features present pricks into every employees veins. Unlike most big organizations where only the top management team feels the pinch, at the Hershey hotel, every worker, regardless of their work position is affected.

The decision-making strategy: Decision-making is a very essential role in any organization.  Brian R. O’ Day integrates and clusters the decision-making procedure into personality-based views, cognitive choice decision approaches and the goal or self-regulation perspective. In this case, every employee takes part in the decision making process. Personality-based views emphasize on the endurance of personal character. A Person’s current need state determines the workplace behavior, whereas cognitive choice emphasizes on the determinant of choice and action. In broader terms, every employee takes part in the decision making process, thus takes obligation of the expectations and subjective valuation of the associated consequences with respect to the decision made.

From a greater point of view, Brian R. O’ Day employs the use of various organizational and managerial Applications. He employs the Alders (ERG theory), Maslow (Need theory), and Adams (Social equity theory). The Maslow need theory applies where every employee is self-actualized. Personal contribution to the institution is recognized and rewarded thereafter. Social equity theory applies in the harmonious working environment that provides employees with opportunities to socialize and at the same time promote a healthy work force. Vroom’s (Expectancy theory), Herzberg (Two-factor theory), Taylor (productivity theory), apply in measuring the general output expected from the persistency and hard work.  An integration of these and other theories is what describes leadership at the Hershey hotel. Brian R. O’ Day has positioned himself in a unique position. Any failure of the business does not entirely place blame on him, but to all the employees. On the other hand, all associated individuals celebrate any success with respect to the business. This is unlike most organizations whose success of failure lies in the hands of a single manager. This approach is what brings in the vast expansion, fame, perfect environment with excellent services at the Hershey hotel. This marks exactly what every organization would need in a leader.

Work Cited

Basset-Jones, N. and Lloyd, G.C. “Does Herzbergs Motivational Theory has staying Power”? Journal of Management Development, Vol.24, No.10, 2005:  pp. 57-66.

Katz, R. “Motivating Technical Professionals Today,” Journal of Research Technology Management, Nov-Dec, vol. 48, Issue 8, 2005: pp. 21-30

Steers, R.M., Mowday, R.T.and Shapiro, D.L “The future of work motivation Theory,” Academy of Management Review, Vol.29, No.3, 2004; pp.379-387.

Whittington, J.Land Evans, B.,”General Issues in Management,” Problems and Perspectives in Management, Issue 2, 2005; pp. 114-122.