Managing Organisations and Human Resources

Executive summary

This report provides practical recommendations using key theoretical ideas to improve the practise of managing diversity, teams, leadership and emotions in the hospitality organisation and help organisations better understand their employees. For a successful organisation individual, groups and the organisations its self contributes.

Theoretical observations: Diversity and Groups

Groups are used because they offer synergy effect, provide additional means of control and improve individual performances, and offer successful performance for a task that could not have been achieved as well by individuals. The term diversity has evolved over the years but in general it describes the rage of visible and non-visible differences that exist between people. Includes but not limited to age, culture, disability, ethnicity, religion beliefs, education, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Having these differences between work group members can affect individuals, groups and the organisation both positively and negatively (Knippenberg, 2007). The social categorisation perspective theory states that similarities and differences between work group members form the basis for categorizing self and others into groups. (Mannix & Neale, 2005) This process can lead to an individual into a group and label others into different categories and then individuals are then treated as category members (Brislin, 2008). Categorisation can be used to develop favrable role for expectations however, these categories can serve as the basis for stereotyping and status judgments. Information/decision-making perspective explains the positive effect of work group diversity. The point of this perspective is that the diverse groups will have a broader range of task-relevant knowledge, skills and abilities and members with different opinions and perspectives. This will allow the group to be more creativity and have an innovative group performance. This theory proposes that in diverse groups individuals have variety of perspectives and approaches to a problem and different sound of information and expertise. This might cause coordination and integration problems for the group but will improve the group outcome.

Theoretical observations: Leadership and Emotions

As a leader a person must deal with the people who are being led, the task that need to be preformed and the environment in which the people and the work exists. There are many different theories or ideologies that can be applied to leadership or what makes a good leader. There are two main theories, behavioural theory of leadership and trait theory of leadership.

Traits theory states that leaders are born with certain character traits or qualities. So it assumes that if you can identify people with these traits or qualities, you can identify leaders and people with leadership potentials. The downside to this theory is that people can change their character traits for the worse, meaning someone that was known for being honest can de deceitful. And if people can learn bad character they can also learn good character traits. The top five traits associated with good leaders are honesty, competent, intelligent, inspiring and forward looking. And all these traits can be learnt and implemented by an individual. The behavioural theory of leadership evaluated that a successful leaders did and developed a taxonomy of actions, and recognized patterns that shows different leadership style. It is based on that leaders are made and not born.  (Bolden, 2003) For an organisation to be successful and preform better, it should employee individuals who have some of the five traits mentioned above but also provide training and guidance as good characteristics can be learnt.