Contemporary Leadership In Hospitality: An Essay.

What is contemporary leadership in hospitality? What will be the challenges facing future leaders of the industry?

The Importance of Ethical Considerations in Hospitality Leadership

The ethical issues that have been publicized concerning the top management of service organizations are influencing the research towards the importance of ethical consideration. The most frequently ethical related issues involve conflict of interests, honesty, respect for others, integrity and customer relationships. The hospitality industry is challenged with different aspects of unethical behaviour of the staff. These aspects, include stealing the organization, billing guests of unordered items, imposing a certain charge to receive a higher guarantee and changing the signed vouchers. Some hotel managers argue that acting unethically might not lead to unlawful behaviour. The ethical leader acts as a role model that the subordinates learn from in conducting their daily activities. He uses the performance appraisal, rewards and punishment to ensure the followers' accountability for the ethical conduct. Ethical leadership It is highly related to the employees' satisfaction with their leaders and organizations (Kim & Brymer, 2011).

The leaders and employees in the hospitality industry have to balance between what is domestically efficient and what is commercially profitable. The hospitality industry is broad, it includes accommodation and food and beverage for pleasure. The employee is the host and the consumer is the guest. The relationship between the employee and the consumer is mediated by the leadership that guides the relationship in an ethical manner and balance between the domestic setting and the consumer needs (Crick & Spencer, 2011).

Ethical leadership is about demonstrating a normatively conduct that is appropriate through the personal attitude and the interpersonal relationships with followers through decision making and effctive communication. The unethical practices pervade in companies, they lack accountability. Organizations tend to embed the moral and ethical concepts in their transformation challenge to their leadership.

Although the classical approach of organizations that try to become ethical, do not focus on ethical leadership. Embedding ethical regulatory processes and activities, like the code of ethics, requires ethical leadership for successful implementation. The analysis of ethical leadership requires an interpretation of exercising different assumptions, including morality, values, general behaviour and beliefs. The ethical thinking is based mainly on common values, like morals and religious values. Creating a normative ethical system could contradict with the law, noting that ethics are informal. It guides the norms within organizations and harmonizes the interpersonal relations (Bachmann, 2015).

The ethical leadership involves personal characteristics, like the neuroticism and moral reasoning and situational variables, like role-playing and ethical context. Researchers found that employee empowerment and the harmoney between the true ethical intention of the leader and his behaviour act as mediating factors between leaders' ethical behaviour and the commitment to the organizational of the employees. The leader ethical behaviour has a direct impact on their followers and their level of job satisfaction organization and commitment.

The ethical leadership in the hospitality industry, involve applying the ethical behaviour and focuses on the legal concerns of the unethical behaviour as well. The ethical codes provide guidance, vision and moral insights through the ethical communication of values to the hotel organization staff. There are four ethical values that control the ethical leadership, including justice, integrity, utility and competencies.

Balancing Domestic Efficiency and Commercial Profitability

The leadership style of the hotel's management is related to their gender, age and the characteristics of the hotel, including hotel size, age and staff members. Studies resulted in important findings that revealed that the leadership actions significantly impact the level of ethical optimization (Kim & Brymer, 2011).

The leadership competency model was developed by David McClelland (1973), as cited in Testa & Sipe (2012), it is a descriptive tool used to build the capability of human resources. Organizations depend on competencies, including job analysis, training, performance appraisal and recruitment and selection. The hospitality competency models focus on specific behaviours that lead to customer satisfaction. These models are customer-focused. They include the recognition of customer problems and customer satisfaction. Both management and leadership take place in the hospitality setting. The managerial skills are necessary for handling the technical components of the services, including planning and decision making. The ethical leadership role in the hospitality industry enables managers to maximize service quality. The long-term success results from the constant development through leadership skills development (Heyes, Beard, & Gehrels, 2015).

The organizational justice is related to treating the employees fairly and how it affects the organizational outcomes. The employees' performance is enhanced when their outputs exceed the inputs due to the ethical behaviour of their leaders. The ethical leader can increase the employees' commitment, satisfaction level and extra job behaviour. Also, he is likely to decrease the turnover rate.

In the hospitality industry, trust refers to the confidence level that the individual has with regard to the likelihood that the other person would act fairly and ethically. The trust mechanism determines the relationship between the leader and the followers and shows how trust can drive the ethical leader to succeed.
The transformational leadership style could be explained in terms of a mutually-motivational relationship between the followers and their leaders. The followers can perform beyond the expectations because the leader can maintain a climate of trust. The leaders can influence the followers to commit to the organization in terms of concepts of morality and higher ideals. In addition, he rewards the followers who can achieve the agreed-upon performance standards (You-De et al., 2013).
According to Boyne (2012), the implicit leadership theory argues that people's everyday ideas about the leaders' behavior are created according to their perceptions. These ideas incorporate similarities with the constructs of practical leadership activities (Boyne, 2012).

Brownell (2010), as cited in Boyne (2012), argues that the servant leadership incorporates the aspects of moral and ethical leadership. Influencing the followers is conducted through the leaders' desire to serve that results in equal leader- follower relationship. The servant leadership style adoption in the hospitality industry is likely to empower the employees, increase the workplace trust and create personal integrity among the team members.

The servant leadership style In the hospitality industry, chooses to serve others in alignment with the industry mission. The hotel managers are required to utilize a mutual benefit relationship between the leaders and followers by providing benefits and services to the employees. These services, including coaching, caring and stimulation to contribute in volunteer activities within the organization. Many organizations in the hospitality industry adopt the servant leadership principles in its philosophy to achieve success. The servant leaders view themselves as servants, not leaders, their motive is to serve not to lead. They are characterized with healing, persuasion, foresight, commitment to people growth, listening, empathy and awareness. (Ling, Lin, & Wu, 2016).

Competency Models for Effective Leadership in Hospitality

The theory X, represents the employees' performance pessimistic view, while the theory Y, represents the optimistic view. The theory X leaders in the hospitality industry are replaced by the theory Y type because of the large number of the employees in the industry. The hospitality leaders are challenged with making a choice between the two opposing value sets. The leaders represent the moral example for the group, they tend to align the followers values with the organizational values, through the vision, consistency, empathy and integrity. The effective leaders are consistent, they tend to maintain a stable performance, decrease the employee turnover and create trust. Also, they focus on the future, they consider the past as an indicator of the future direction of the organization. In addition, they foster the change through guiding and influencing the employees. Moreover, they create a culture-base of shared values through involving the employees in crafting the programs that they will follow in the future. The personal power of the leaders enables them to establish emotional links with the followers. This interactive relationship creates the equality between the leaders and followers and enables leaders to manage things while leading the team. These characteristics foster the emotional and social commitment to the workplace and keep the employees attached to it (Alexakis, 2011; Wang, 2016; ?ahin, 2012).

the pleasures and pains of services production. A big challenge is represented in employing low skills employees. These employees are required to assist the client to feel important, admired, welcomed, special and satisfied. The hotels are considered the last resort jobs because they are associated with the dirty work. It is hard to find the best talents to fill these jobs, also the turnover rate is high in the industry.

In addition, the hospitality industry is challenged with its ability to control quality because of the multidimensional nature of its services. It requires employees to show emotion and welcoming attitude and interaction with the customers with various cultural dimensions. The ethical leader role is to establish the framework that guides the employees and customer interaction. They have to provide support, training, coaching and empower the employees to increase the employee satisfaction and deliver high quality service (Crick & Spencer, 2011).

The morality of hospitality analyses involves the activities in the cultural, domestic and commercial domains. Each domain explains a feature of a hospitality activity, where the cultural domain considers the impact of the belief system on productivity
(Lashley, 2015).

The changing customer preferences and needs obligate hotels to deliver high-quality service to satisfy customer needs (Md Salleh et al., 2010).

When discussing what the future hospitality leadership is required to know, we should examine the expectancy theories of motivations. The employee empowerment represents a good predictor of employee motivation. The future hospitality ethical leadership should consider both styles of the servant and transformational leadership styles to articulate their ethical behaviour. The two approaches are liked, both of them consider the employee empowerment behaviour. Employee empowerment is also beneficial to middle-level leaders (Boyne, 2012).

Transforming Organizational Culture through Ethical Leadership

The ethical leader is required to consider the role of trust in maintaining the employee engagement to organizations in the hospitality industry. The self-motivated employees are highly engaged to their work and performing their tasks. Trust in the leader is important, it is a major factor in the relationship between the leader and the followers. The ethical behaviour of the leaders influences the followers' trust, whether the leader has the servant or the transformational characteristics (Kelloway et al., 2012). The ethical leader is trustworthy, he displays characteristics of honesty, caring, acceptance, kindness and make balanced decisions. He communicates ethics with the employees and sets clear standards of what should be done at the workplace. Leaders with high behavioural consistency are those who can transform their moral intention into ethical behaviour. These leaders are trustworthy by followers. Ethical leaders should involve the employees in the decision-making and facilitate their potential growth (Hoogervorst, 2011). Johnson, Shelton and Yates (2012), as cited in Engelbrecht, Heine, & Mahembe (2014), assure that there is a positive impact of ethical leadership on employees trust, who as a result of established trust, are more likely to trust their workplace.

In summary, Ethical leadership is about demonstrating a normatively conduct that is appropriate through the personal attitude and the interpersonal relationships with followers through decision making and effective communication. Embedding ethical regulatory processes and activities, like the code of ethics, requires ethical leadership for successful implementation. The analysis of ethical leadership requires an interpretation of exercising different assumptions, including morality, values, general behaviour and beliefs.

The ethical leadership in the hospitality industry, involve applying the ethical behaviour and focuses on the legal aspects of the unethical behaviour as well. The ethical codes provide guidance, vision and moral insights through the ethical communication of values to the hotel organization staff. In the hospitality industry, trust refers to the confidence level that the individual has with regard to the likelihood that the other person would perform fairly and ethically. The trust mechanism determines the relationship between the leader and the followers and shows how trust can drive the ethical leader to succeed.

In the hospitality industry, the servant leadership incorporates the moral and ethical aspects of leadership. Influencing the followers is conducted through the leaders' desire to serve that result in equal leader- follower relationship. 

Reference List

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