DOMINICAN COLLEGE OF TARLAC

Capas, Tarlac
COLLEGE DEPARTMENT
A.Y. 2021-2022, FIRST SEMESTER
OBE FACULTY-DESIGNED MODULE

I. Subject: Quality Service Management for Hospitality and Tourism

II. Learning Outcomes:

a. Describe why a hospitality organization’s culture is so important to service
success.
b. Understand why the organization’s leaders are so important to defining,
developing, teaching, and maintaining its culture.
c. Identify the essential roles the organization’s beliefs, values, and norms play.

III. Topic/Lesson: Developing the Hospitality Culture: Everyone Serves!

IV. Days of Learning Sessions: Monday and Wednesday

V. Delivery

Lesson Starter:

1. Motivation Phase

1.1. Pre-assessment Activity (Collaboration):

2. Presentation Phase:
The 3-A Approach

2.1. ANALYSIS (Communication):

Getting everyone in the organization committed to high levels of guest service is a
daunting challenge. Not only did Walt Disney, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, and Horst
Schultz of Ritz-Carlton spend their personal time and energy necessary to create and sustain
the organizational culture that still defines the corporate values for which their organizations are
famous; they also got their employees and managers to believe in the culture. They knew that,
as leaders, they were responsible for defining the culture. They all had a strong commitment to
excellent service, and they communicated it—through their words and deeds—clearly and
consistently to those inside and outside the organization.
Sustaining the quality of the customer experience is everyone’s job. Not only must all the
public and private statements and actions support the idea that everyone serves; the
organizational reward system, training programs, and measures of achievement must also
support and reinforce this message. When managers publicly and loudly celebrate the service
achievements of their employees, they send a very strong message to everyone else about
what the organization believes in and what its culture values.

2.2. ABSTRACTION (Critical Thinking):

Culture and Reputation
A company’s culture, like a person’s character, drives its reputation. Companies whose
culture honor customers, employees, and shareholders usually have excellent reputations with
all three groups. These organizations recognize the importance of a strong culture in the
competitive marketplace, a strong culture that everyone believes in, understands, and supports.

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All organizations have a culture, whether or not anyone spends any time worrying about it,
shaping it, or teaching it.
Managers who do not effectively manage their organizations’ cultures encourage weak
organizational cultures or, worse yet, cultures that are structured and defined by someone or a
group that may not be concerned with or may even seek to subvert the organization’s mission.
Managers of effective hospitality organizations, on the other hand, understand the value
of a strong culture and do whatever they can to reaffirm and support what the organization
values and believes. If the culture values excellent service, the members learn that providing
excellent service is what they are supposed to do. The stronger this cultural norm is and the
more the members accept and believe in it, the more likely it is that they will try to do whatever
they can to create and sustain service excellence.
The Manager’s Most Important Responsibility
This lesson presents the concept of corporate culture, why and how excellent managers
communicate culture to employees, the value of creating a strong culture versus a weak culture,
how to change an existing culture, and how managers can work with their culture to ensure that
it supports the organizational mission of service excellence.
Everyone has been in an organization that feels warm, friendly, and helpful, perhaps for
reasons they can’t quite explain. Similarly, everyone has been in an organization that feels cold,
aloof, uncaring, and impersonal. While most people can readily give examples of organizations
that fit the two types, few can really explain what makes the two types different.
Making culture different in the right ways is the hospitality manager’s responsibility.
The Importance of Culture
Strategy is no more than a piece of paper without a supporting culture. The
organization’s strategy must be connected to its culture. No matter how brilliant and well thought
out a strategy is, it will fail if it doesn’t fit with the organization’s cultural values and beliefs.
Strategy and Employee Commitment
The firm’s competitive strategy provides the basis for such critical decisions as how the
organization will be structured, what type of service it wants to deliver, what market niche it
seeks to fill, what production and service delivery system it will use, who it will hire, and how it
will train, reward, promote, and evaluate those people. But only employee commitment to
implementing all those critical decisions can turn plans into actions. All the plans in the world are
useless without employee understanding, commitment, and support.
Hospitality organizations that seek to provide an exceptional service experience require
an especially high level of commitment and understanding from their employees. The Boulders,
a luxury property in Arizona, has the vision statement, “Seek opportunities to create memories.”
This vision, supported by ten principles, is emphasized through the use of coaches, orientation,
training, and employee recognition programs. The vision does not spell out specific actions to
take, but emphasizes how the employees should look for opportunities to deliver excellent
service.
Culture as a Competitive Advantage
An organization’s culture can be a significant competitive advantage if it has value to its
members, is unique, and cannot be easily copied by others. If an organization has a strong
culture that others cannot readily duplicate, it can use that culture to attract both customers and
employees. A good strategy is to identify other organizations with successful cultures and try to
emulate the processes used to create those cultures in your own company.
For example, Southwest Airlines has a thriving culture that others can use as a
benchmark for their own. A big part of that culture is “Living the Southwest Way,” which means
“displaying a Warrior Spirit” (work hard, desire to be the best, be courageous, display a sense of
urgency, persevere, and innovate), with a “Servant’s Heart” (follow the Golden Rule, adhere to
the basic principles, treat others with respect, put others first, be egalitarian, demonstrate

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proactive customer service, and embrace the SWA family), and embracing a “Fun-LUVing
Attitude” (have fun, don’t take yourself too seriously, maintain perspective [balance], celebrate
successes, enjoy your work, and be a passionate team player).
Management by Culture!
The stronger the culture, the less necessary it is to rely on the typical bureaucratic
management controls—policies, procedures, and managerial directives—found in traditional
industrial organizations. If the culture can effectively substitute for such expensive control
mechanisms, that in itself is a pretty good reason for the hospitality organization to spend the
time and money needed to build a strong culture.
Culture as a Competency
If an organization’s culture is strong, it becomes another core competency. As would be
true for other core competencies, the organization that seeks to do something incompatible with
its culture is likely to fail.
If, for example, members of an organization’s culture believe they should provide a high-
value service experience, any manager trying to implement a cost-saving move that somehow
jeopardizes their ability to provide that experience will meet resistance.
Culture
An organization’s culture is a way of behaving, thinking, and acting that is learned and
shared by the organization’s members. A more formal definition is one that follows: the shared
philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and norms that knit a
community of different people together.
Culture and the Outside the World
Culture helps an organization’s members deal with two core issues that all organizations
must resolve: how to relate to the world outside of the organization, and how the organization’s
members should relate to one another.
Some managers define how their organizations should deal with the outside world by
taking a closed or negative view of the outside environment and encouraging an “us-versus-
them” cultural mindset. Members of such a culture are unreceptive to new ideas from the
outside; they tend to discard or downplay common industry practices or innovations, and are
generally secretive about what their organization is doing and protective of its “proprietary
knowledge.”
Culture and the Internal Organization: X and Y
Theory Y managers assume that people like to work, derive real satisfaction from their
work, and want to do a good job. Theory X managers assume that people will work only as hard
as they are made to work. In life, of course, most managers fall somewhere between these
extremes. People entering one culture type from another quickly learn that the behaviors and
actions managers rewarded and respected in their former organization may not be respected or
rewarded by managers in the new one. Part of the employee hiring process should include an
introduction to the new culture to help new hires learn the cultural norms, values, and beliefs.

Teaching the New Values

Since everyone brings to a new job the cultural assumptions of past experiences,
managers of excellent hospitality organizations know they must start teaching new cultural
values to employees from day one. Orientation is considered essential in hospitality
organizations, and companies known for their strong cultures—like Disney, The Ritz-Carlton,
Gaylord, and Four Seasons—earned that reputation by spending considerable time and money
on teaching their cultures to new employees.

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Culture Fills the Gaps
The cultural teachings become employee beliefs about how things should be, values of
what has worth, and norms of behavior. They provide guidance to the culture’s members as
they interact with each other and their customers.
Excellent hospitality organizations, knowing that rules and procedures cannot cover
everything, spend their time defining and teaching the culture so that their employees will know
how they should act in treating their guests and one another. These organizations teach their
employees as much as they can, and then rely on culture to fill in the inevitable gaps between
what can be predicted and what actually happens when guests enter the service setting.
Beliefs, Values, and Norms
Beliefs
Beliefs form the ideological core of the culture. Beliefs define the relationships between
causes and effects for the organizational members. A belief is how people in organizations
make sense of their relationships with the external world and its influence on the internal
organization.
Values
Values are preferences for certain behaviors or certain outcomes over others. Values
define for the members what is right and wrong, preferred and not preferred, desirable behavior
and undesirable behavior.
If management sends a clear signal to all employees that providing good customer
service is an important value to the organization, then the employees know they should adopt
this value. Consequently, they are more likely to behave in ways that ensure that the customer
has a good service experience.
Norms
Norms are standards of behavior that define how people are expected to act while part
of the organization.
Most outstanding hospitality organizations have norms of greeting a guest warmly,
smiling, and making eye contact to show interest in the guest. Some use the ten/five foot rule.
Once guests are within ten feet of employees—window washers, engineers, and ground crews,
as well as guest-contact persons—they are within the “hospitality zone” and the behavior norm
is for employees to make eye contact and smile. Once guests are within five feet of employees,
the behavior norm is to briefly speak to or engage the guest.
Folkways and Mores
Folkways are the customary, habitual ways in which organizational members act or
think, without reflecting upon them. Shaking hands (or not shaking hands), addressing everyone
by first or last name, and wearing or not wearing a tie would all be examples of folkways.
In a restaurant, a folkway might be to roll silverware when there is nothing else to do in
the quiet times between crowds.
An organization’s mores are folkways that go beyond being polite. These are customary
behaviors that must be followed to preserve the organization’s efficient operation and survival.
Mores require certain acts and forbid others. By indicating what is right and wrong, they form the
basis of the organization’s code of ethics and accepted behaviors.

2.3. APPLICATION (Creativity):

Come up with a list of what factors or aspects make up an organizational culture. Which
characteristics are the most important?
3. Assessment Phase:
3.1. Work Activities

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 1. Why is culture such an important concept to guest service organizations? a. How does
culture influence the guest experience?
2. Recall any organization in which you were heavily involved as an employee or as a
student.
a. How would you describe the culture of that organization?
b. What did the managers or leaders do or not do to cause the culture be as you described
it?
c. What ideas in this lesson could the managers or leaders have used to improve the
organizational culture?

3.2. Take Home Tasks

Case Study
Doug’s Fried Chicken Within four years of assuming the presidency, Judy Hart brought
the market share of Doug’s Fried Chicken from 2 percent to 20 percent. She was a risk-taking,
innovative entrepreneur. She increased the chain from 400 outlets to 1743 and rapidly
expanded into 27 countries. “I’ve got to be involved in a continual go-go growth cycle. Because
of my successful track record, the franchisees and the board go along with any programs I
propose,” Hart believed. Hart was flamboyant and sensational. She shifted the annual
franchisee convention from Des Moines, Iowa, to New York. She moved headquarters from a
converted post office into a new $5.8 million building. Then, one Friday afternoon, Doug’s board
of directors dismissed Hart from the presidency. “Judy,” said Chairman Doug Jones, “for a while
we liked your ‘fullsteam-ahead’ attitude. But you can’t seem to slow down. You’re trying to
change too many things too fast.” The board elevated John Davis, vice president for finance, to
the position of president. Davis was a conservative, accommodating executive who watched
budgets closely and believed in rigorously controlled expansion. He emphasized fiscal
responsibility. Davis set up a centralized purchasing system (which Judy Hart had always
opposed). Board Chairman Doug Jones was pleased; he considered Davis to be “in tune with
the mood of the board and the franchisees at this point in time.” Judy Hart was unemployed
over the weekend. Then she was enthusiastically hired by Berger’s Burgers, a company that
had achieved financial stability only in the last couple of years. Now they were in a strong cash
position. “Judy,” said Horace Berger, chairman of the board, “we think we’re ready to take off.
We want to triple the number of Berger’s Burgers outlets within three years. Can you do it?”
“Can do, Mr. Berger,” said Judy happily. “But first we’ve got to refurbish this tacky headquarters
building and change the site of the annual convention. I envision a truly spectacular party for the
franchisees in Las Vegas….”
***
1. How do you explain Judy Hart’s unceremonious dumping from Doug’s and her warm
welcome at Berger’s?
2. Did Doug’s make the right decision? Did Berger?
VII. References

Ford, R. C., Sturman, M. C., & Heaton, C. P. (2012). Managing quality service in
hospitality: How organizations achieve excellence in the guest experience. Clifton
Park, New York: Delmar Cengage Learning.

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