The hospitality industry represents a unique environment marked by high-quality standards and customer satisfaction. A contemporary business environment requires exceptional leadership skills and knowledge, flexibility, and excellent communication skills. The supervisory role in hospitality organizations requires the application of managerial skills and leadership attributes in order to maintain high-quality standards and meet customer expectations and service demands. The aim of the paper is to prove that “the supervisory role requires the application of managerial functional skills as well as the exercise of leadership attributes’.
There are different definitions exist to determine the roles and duties of supervisors. Following Higson and Wilson (1995) a supervisor’s post is seen below front-line managers. in this case, their role is to introduce and control directions and strategies goals determined by managers. The supervisory role is to communicate and motivate employees, control task completion, and determine performance problems. In modern hospitality organizations, managerial tasks increase in complexity, and thus in difficulty, as one moves from the operations level to the strategic apex.
That is hardly a significant discovery, nor is it particularly significant to observe that most managers develop the capacity to deal with increasing complexity. For the supervisors, task complexity defines requisite conceptual complexity and mandates that conceptual complexity increase systematically as managers move higher in their organizations (“WYPS cuts stress-related illness:” 2008). Those who do not continue to develop will plateau or derail.
A manager’s capacity to continue developing thus becomes an extraordinarily important issue for all organizations concerned with executive development and succession. Current capacity is that level of complexity that can be mastered at the given time. Its measure is the maximum level of task complexity that, all other things equal, an incumbent can successfully deal with. Mode is the maximum level of task complexity that, all other things equal, can eventually be mastered (Wong and Pang, 2003).
The role of supervisors is to motivate employees and explain to them the goals and strategic directions of the department. In order to fulfill these functions, they have to use the main managerial skills such as effective communication, relationships management, and decision-making. In hospitality management, reflective thinking is a meaning-making activity, in which the elements of experience are placed in relationship with one another to form what might be termed an implicit decision support system (Smith,1982).
Supervisors’ functional skills are required for the development of these mental models, and therefore they thought it likely that significant individual differences would be found in the proclivity (intrinsic motivation) to build them. Organizations that compete more effectively get a larger portion of available resources, which means that those that compete less effectively get fewer resources. Organizations act much like other systems that have intelligence. Supervisors have goals and long-term strategies for achieving them.
By the same token, they also have strategies for how they are going to compete with other organizations to obtain the resources they need. The dynamics are the same for both drives. In hospitality management, control over resources needed by others creates resources dependency, and thus some degree of control over the decision options that managers can exercise in the dependent organization.
If available decision options can be viewed as a resource, then this is also a competition. There consequently is a drive to gain some measure of control over the resources that a competitor needs, thereby gaining the power to control that competitor’s options, and there is a drive to reduce one’s own resources dependency, thereby reducing the power of others to control one’s own options (Papadopoulou et al 1995).
The relationship between managerial skills and supervisory attributes indicates an interesting reciprocal interdependence. On the one hand, the supervisors’ functional skills are required to evaluate the performance of the executive leadership, provide advice to the executive leadership, and have the authority to introduce new training programs and career development; on the other hand, they may be dependent on the firm’s executive leadership for contracts for their own organizations (Martin et al 2006).
Thus, members who are external to an organization may have a business or professional affiliation with it that potentially reduces their ability to function as independent members. Although leaders need behavioral complexity if they are to be effective, the leadership roles that they require in their portfolios will differ substantially in substance and level of specificity (Armandi et al 2003).
Just as the strategic task of the supervisor has been split into the stages of scanning, analysis, choice, and implementation, the cognitive demands of strategic leadership can be characterized as attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval of strategic information in order to act. At the group level, that is, within the top team, there are the additional collective cognitive processes of sharing meanings, constructing interpretive frames, and socializing processes for choosing and coordinating action (Brown, 1974). It has been argued that over and above these individual and collective cognitive demands of strategic information processing, the supervisor has the additional pressure of collating and making sense of the entire top team’s views (Conger, 2002).
The functional skills of the supervisors are to motivate and encourage employees. These lead to high productivity and cooperation between all group members. The notion that supervisors can develop part of their foresight through an exploration of long-term agendas of a wide variety of stakeholders also has implications for their behavioral repertoires. Such explorations by supervisors with their stakeholders may result in expanded role repertoires, achieved through contemplating the potential behaviors that could be made in response to a realm of potential environmental scenarios (Cunningham and Hyman, 1995).
The exploration of long-term ideas is analogous to a series of if-then. Consideration and initiation of the structure still represent important criteria for evaluation, but we expect that the content of these roles will be less specific for executive leaders, reflecting the unique qualities of work at the top level. Social intelligence refers to their cognitive representations of social elements in their environment (Conger, 2002).
Supervisors’ functional skills involve relationships management techniques and strategies. They need to be sensitive to the emotions and values of the stakeholders of the organization as well as to the emotions of employees in their direct interactions with customers. Executive leaders high in social intelligence understand that environmental interest groups will do more than pressure their organization to improve its pollution prevention activities. These groups will simultaneously pressure politicians to take a stand, urge voters to call their political representatives and attempt to convince the organization’s distributors and buyers to go elsewhere.
This understanding of the network of social relationships and the potential emotional reactions will encourage executive leaders to seek input from community organizations regarding the creation and operation of facilities or from environmental interest groups regarding pollution issues. In this manner, supervisors not only show sensitivity to the concerns of their many stakeholder groups and work toward cooperative rather than hostile relationships with them, but they also increase the likelihood that the values of their organizations start to reflect the values of the interest groups. The organization comes to reflect in part the diverse perspectives of its stakeholder groups as its executive leaders’ vision becomes more informed and their values are affected by the experience.
In sum, supervisors’ functional skills involve strong leadership skills and knowledge in order to manage hospitality organizations and meet environmental changes. Supervisors with requisite social skills and behavioral complexity will be better able to meet the needs of their stakeholders than will those lower in social intelligence and behavioral complexity. They will use their stakeholder relationships to discern changes in the needs and types of customers and translate that knowledge into appropriate organizational responses.
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