DEVELOPING THE

HOSPITALITY CULTURE:
Everyone Serves!
Learning Objectives
Why a hospitality organization’s culture is so important to
service success.
Why the organization’s leaders are so important to
defining, developing, teaching, and maintaining its
culture.
What essential roles the organization’s beliefs, values,
and norms play.
Learning Objectives
How the organization communicates its culture to its
employees- through laws, language, stories, legends,
heroes, symbols and rituals.
How the organization can accomplish the difficult task of
changing its culture, if that becomes necessary.
What research reveals about organizational cultures.
The importance of leaders
- leaders have 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.
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.
Culture and Reputation
- these organizations recognize the importance of a
strong culture in the competitive marketplace, a strong
culture that everyone believes in, understands and
supports.
Culture and Reputation
- managers of effective hospitality organizations,
understand the value of a strong culture and do whatever
they can to reaffirm and support what the organization
values and believes.
The manager’s most important
responsibility
- everyone has been in an organization that feels warm,
friendly, and helpful, perhaps for reasons they cant quiet
explain. Similarly, everyone has been in an organization
that feels cold, aloof, uncaring, and impersonal. Making
culture different in the right ways is the hospitality
manager’s responsibility.
The importance of culture
- the organizations 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.
Strategy and employee commitment
- only employee commitment to implementing all those
critical decisions can turn plans into actions. All the plans in
the world are useless without employee’s understanding,
commitment, and support.
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.
Culture as a competitive advantage
- working in a culture where the employees truly have
the spirit is very different from working in a culture where
the norm is for employees to work only the typical nine to
five job. More importantly, being a costumer who
encounters this type of culture is unique and fun.
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 hospitality organization to
spend the time and money needed to build a strong culture.
An Example: The chef
- in some cases, professional values can substitute for
or complement values of the organization. The cultural
values of the professional chef are particularly strong.
While much of any culinary program is devoted to teaching
the principles of cooking, implicit in all the culinary training
is the cultural value of preparing a consistent fine – dining
experience. Regardless of program or type of culinary
training, one central value stands out:
An Example: The chef
- The chef must strive for flawless production of the food
delivered in a fine – dining experience for every guest every
time. Indeed, some casual dining chains have sent their
cooks to culinary courses not so much to learn how to
respect the culinary cultural values of product quality and
consistency so that the diner at a Chilli’s or olive garden,
like the diner at a five star Parisian restaurant, will have a
consistently prepared meal.
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,
numbers 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 Defined
- 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 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.
Culture and the Internal Organization:
X and Y
- relating to the outside world refers to how the members
of the organization see the world, what assumptions they
make about the organization’s relationship to that world,
and how members are supposed to respond to external
events.
Culture and the Internal Organization:
X and Y
- relating to one another inside the culture refers to how
the members see their collective mission, the ways they
interact or interact or interrelate with each other to
accomplish that mission, and the assumptions they should
use in making decisions about those things they control
their functional areas, interpersonal relationships, and
attitudes toward change and adaptation.
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.
Teaching the New Values
- 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 in teaching their cultures to new
employees.
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 cultures
members as they interact with each other and their
customers.
Beliefs, Values and Norms
- culture – driven organizations seek to define the
beliefs, values and norms of the organization through what
their managers do, say, and write as well as by who they
reward, recognize, and promote.
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. If
culture is a set of assumptions about how things operate,
beliefs are formed to help the people inside the organization
make sense of how those assumptions influence what they do
inside the 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. Obviously, values can
be a strong influence on employee behavior with in an
organizational culture.
Norms
- norms are standards of behavior that define how
people are expected to act while part of the organization.
The typical organization has an intricate set of norms.
Some are immediately obvious, and some require the
advice and counsel of veteran employees who have
learned norms overtime by watching what works and what
doesn’t work, what gets rewarded, and what gets punished.
Norms
- cultural norms are defined and shaped for the
hospitality employee not only by the fellow employees and
supervisors but also by guests who make their expectations
plain. Such guest are an advantage that hospitality
organizations have over manufacturing organizations these
guests become potent assistants to the managers in
monitoring, reinforcing, and shaping employee behavior.
Norms in Advertising
• Many hospitality organizations use advertising as a means to sell
their services, to show the guest visually what the guest experience
should look like. Since the employees see the same ads, they also
learn the norms of behavior that guests will expect, and this
advertising serves to train them just as it informs prospective guests.
The guest arrives with predefined expectations, and the hospitality
employees know what they are and also know that they had better
meet or exceed those expectations or the guest will be unhappy and
dissatisfied.
Norms of Appearance
• In addition to the norms of behavior, most hospitality organizations have
norms of appearance and standards of personal grooming. For example,
employees may not be allowed to have hair that extends below a certain
length; only women may have pierced ears and earrings must be smaller
than a certain size; fingernails may not be excessively long or colored in
unusual ways; and necklaces, bracelets, beards, moustaches, visible tattoos
are not allowed, and so forth. Although such norms can lead to criticism
about restrictions on personal freedom of expression regarding appearance,
hospitality organizations must meet guest expectations in this regard, as in
all areas of service.
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.
Cultural and the Environment
• The organization’s culture, then, represents a shared learning
process that continues over time as the people inside the
organization change, grow, and develop while responding to a
world that does the same. The world external to the organization
(consisting of the physical, technological, and cultural environment)
defines the activities and patterns of interactions for the
organization’s members who have to deal with that external world.
Ed Schein says
Learning the Culture, Learning from the
Culture
• As new people join the organization, they learn the culture from both formal company practices
such as training and reward systems and informal social interaction with fellow employees,
supervisors, and subordinates. They learn the right way and the wrong way to do things in that
particular culture.
• While most product manufacturers need to focus on teaching employees only the hows of
producing the product, the hospitality organization must also teach its employees the whys.
Developing, reinforcing, and communicating clear cultural norms about what is and is not the
right way to deal with customers is a very effective way to teach those whys. A sign frequently
seen in customer-focused organizations says:
• Rule 1: The customer is always right.
• Rule 2: If you think the customer is wrong, re-read Rule 1
Subcultures
• Cultures can often split into subcultures. Usually, the more people
involved in the culture and the harder it is for them to stay in
communication with one another, the more likely it is that the
organization will see some subcultures form. Subcultures can be
good or bad, supportive or destructive, and consistent with or
contrary to the larger corporate culture.
Subcultures of Nations
• Just like subcultures in organizations, organizations themselves can be
thought of as subcultures of ethnic populations, nations, or even entire
geographic regions. When an organization seeks to open a branch or start a
business in a cultural setting it is not accustomed to, it can often have
unexpected challenges. Disney was unprepared for the challenges that
opening EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris) would have. The point is simple.
Just as hospitality managers must pay attention to and manage how they
relate to the subcultures that may form in their organizations, they must
recognize that they must also pay attention to and manage how they relate to
the larger culture in which their organization is embedded.
Communicating the Culture
• While the substance of culture is a set of assumptions that lead to
beliefs, values, and norms, culture is communicated to those inside
and outside the organization in a variety of ways, including laws,
language, stories, legends, heroes, symbols, and rituals. In these
ways, people can express, affirm, and communicate their shared
beliefs, values, and norms to each other and to those outside the
organization.
Laws
• The laws of an organization are its rules, policies, and regulations—
the norms that are so important that they need to be written down
so everyone knows exactly what they are. They tell the members
what behaviors are expected within that culture and also detail the
consequences of violating the norm.
Language
• In addition to the common language of the larger social culture,
each organization develops a language of its own, which is
frequently incomprehensible to outsiders. The special language is
an important vehicle both for communicating the common cultural
elements to which the language refers and in reaffirming the identity
with the culture that those who speak this language share. Terms an
insider uses to talk with another insider communicate an important
concept quickly and also distinguish that person from an outsider.
Stories, Legends, and Heroes
• Stories, legends, and heroes are another way of transmitting cultural
beliefs, values, and norms. They communicate proper behaviors and the
right and wrong way to do things. The best at building culture use stories
extensively. Disney, Four Seasons, Gaylord, and the Ritz-Carlton all have
their collection of stories that are used by managers to teach the culture.
Symbols
• A symbol is a physical object that has significance beyond itself, a sign
that communicates an unspoken message. Cultural symbols are
everywhere in organizations. A window office, an office on the top floor,
or a desk and office in a particular location communicate information
about the status and organizational power of the person within that
transcends the mere physical objects involved. At Walt Disney World
Resort, Mickey’s famous mouse ears are everywhere.
Rituals
• Rituals are symbolic acts that people perform to gain and maintain
membership or identity within an organization. At most hospitality
organizations, all employees go through a similar training program. Rituals
are mainly informational new employees learn the organizational basics and
cultural heritage. But, like military boot camp or initiation into a sorority, it
also has ritualistic significance because everyone goes through the
experience upon entry into the company to learn and share the common
culture. Most hospitality organizations develop elaborate ritual celebrations
of service excellence.
Leaders Teach the Culture
• Managers of effective hospitality organizations constantly teach the
culture to their employees, reinforcing the values, mores, and laws. Strong
cultures are reinforced by a strong commitment by top management to the
cultural values. Ed Schein suggests that the only thing of real importance
that leaders do is to create and maintain the organizations culture.
Setting the Example
• Bill Marriott Jr. provides a good example of how a leader can help
to sustain the culture. He is famous for dropping in at a hotel and
chatting with everyone he sees. He has been known to get up early
in the morning and wander into the Marriott kitchens to make sure
the pancakes are being cooked properly.
Guests Teach the Culture
• Ride operators learn how different categories of customers respond to them and the parts
they are playing on stage. For example, infants and small children are generally timid, if
not frightened, in their presence. School age children are somewhat curious, aware that
the operator is at work playing a role but sometimes in awe of the role itself. Nonetheless,
the children can be quite critical of any flaw in the operator’s performance. Teenagers,
especially males in groups, present problems because they sometimes go to great lengths
to embarrass, challenge, ridicule, or outwit an operator. The point here is that ride
operators learn what the public (or at least their idealized version of the public) expects of
their role and find it easier to conform to such expectations than not. Moreover, they
discover that when they are bright and lively, others respond to them in like ways.
Culture and the Organization Chart
• A leader can define the value of a functional area by placing that area at
the bottom or near the top of the organizational chart. For example,
placing the quality assurance function near the top of the chart and
requiring its manager to report to a high-level executive tells the
organization’s employees that the leader values quality.
Culture and Physical Space
• The layout of physical space is another secondary mechanism that can
send a cultural message. For example, office size and location are
traditional symbols of status and prestige. By putting the executive chef in
the big office out front, the leader tells the rest of the organization that the
chef plays an important role in the organizational culture and that
producing food of high quality is an important organizational function.
Culture and Leadership Skills
• The success with which leaders use the mechanisms discussed above to
convey cultural values is a good measure of their leadership skills. When
they concentrate on using them together in a holistic way, they can ensure
that all mechanisms convey to employees a consistent set of cultural
beliefs, values, and norms.
At Southwest: Maintaining a Strong Culture

• Truly outstanding hospitality organizations engage all their members in

teaching each other the organization’s culture. Good managers create the
opportunities for this teaching and learning to happen. For example,
Southwest Airlines created a Culture Committee, whose responsibility
was perpetuating the Southwest Spirit. The Culture Committee was
created in 1990 “to take the lead in preserving the airline’s unique
culture.”
Changing the Culture
• The world changes and the people inside the organization change. The culture must
also evolve to help members cope with the new realities that the organization faces.
Even a culture that starts out with a strong customer orientation may change over
time as the managers, customers, and employees change. No matter how good a job
the founder did in defining the culture and getting everyone to buy into it, the next
generation of managers must work, perhaps even harder, to sustain those cultural
values that should endure while changing those that need changing. They have
available, of course, all the tools discussed in this chapter to do this. The
communication tools of symbols, legends, language, stories, heroes, and rituals need
constant attention to sustain the cultural values in the face of changing
circumstances.
Denny’s Restaurants
• The most difficult task of all is changing an entire culture that is not
service oriented. When a negative culture is pervasive throughout an
organization, it can be very challenging to make a change to a positive
culture, even when the culture is causing major problems.
Lessons Learned
1.Leaders define and teach organizational culture to everyone by what they say and do every day, and by
what they reward.
2. Culture fills in the gaps for employees between what they’ve been taught and what they must do to
satisfy the guest.
3. To create a culture of success, celebrate success—publicly.
4. Leaders think carefully about how everything they say, do, or write ties into supporting the cultural
values of guest service.
5. Leaders find heroes, tell stories, and repeat legends to reinforce the important cultural values.
6. Leaders know that one of their most important jobs is to teach culture.
7. Leaders celebrate employee actions that help fulfill the customer service mission.
THANK YOU