Cultural Norms and Expectations Within the Hospitality Industry

Chapter Objectives

The business environment differs across nations and throughout industries. The hospitality industry is no different; one managerial approach that functions well in one nation might not be necessarily applicable in another. This suggests that to successfully manage across different countries it is vital that managers acquire the necessary skills to effectively manage employees and guests with different backgrounds and expectations. Hence the objectives of this chapter are to:

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  Define and discuss culture and cross-culture management

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  Explain the importance of understanding multicultural perspectives

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  Discuss the managerial approaches of managing workforce diversity and cultural diversity

Introduction

According to the labour migration report released by the British Hospitality Association (2017), up to 23.7% of the UK hospitality workforce market is made up by European nationals, other than British, and 15% are nationals of the rest of the world. The percentage varies based on location, with the highest in London, where the hospitality related workforce come from migrant labour force in proportion of 64%. Moreover, in some businesses the percentage of migrant workers can grow to 98% (National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2016). As the recruitment needs are constantly growing, and currently a quarter of hospitality related businesses have an average of 38% hard-to-fill vacancies the solution links with the use of the international talent pool. Thus, the success of a hospitality firm relies on the management of both multicultural workforce and multicultural guests. This could be an opportunity as different cultural background could be beneficial to companies in the hospitality industry. However, undoubtedly this can also be a challenge for both managers and operational workers as the differences of cultural background may lead to conflicts, which could damage not only the workflow and the work environment, nevertheless the company image as well. Many issues might be related to communication, they could however be beyond language and might reside in the lack of cultural awareness and sensitiveness to understand the differences in culture.