Navigating Conflict in the Hospitality Industry

1.0 Literature review

The hotel business is the place where a large number of employees is working together and also the percentage of guest is higher. Therefore the hotels might experience a high level of conflicts as compared with the other business. The conflicts in the hotel industry can be seen as the disagreement and discrepancy between two guests, the department of the employee as well as in between the employee and guest. It can be said that dealing with the guest is one of the toughest tasks for the service industry as the complaint can result in a bad online review and the negative reviews can cause switching of the positive customer from services that leads to the bad reputation of the hotel in the market. The section will discuss the conflict that occurs between hotels staffs and customers.

1.1 The process of conflict

According to the process-model the conflict occurs when the individual feels forced and gets blockage from others and hence start resisting it. The primary aim of the process-model is to identify the stages which occurred in conflict process. Each stage is formed as per the consequences of previous stage and every stage prepares or creates the basis for next stage (Robbins, 1998). The first stage is the potential conflict in which the condition arises that creates the opportunity for the conflict to occur. All the condition that is present in the conflict does not necessarily creates the conflict but at least one of it creates it. The potential conflict might arise from the factors like difference in purpose, distribution of limited resources and many others. The second stage of conflict that arises in any of the hospitality sectors is Comprehension and personalization stage. In this stage the individual or the group members become more aware of the fact that conflict has occurred (Robbins, 1998). The conflicts may vary and it’s depending upon the perspective of an individual and also the influence that the conflict has created on an individual (Ozkalp and Kirel, 1997).

The conflict in the comprehension stage can be classified into Perceived conflict and the felt conflict. The perceived conflict can be said as the stage when the individual is aware of the fact that the conflict had taken place like the manager in hotel who gets idea about the conflict even he is not aware of what causes the conflict between employee and other individual (Yirik and Yõldõrõm, 2015). The felt conflict arises once the perceived conflict is shared among or within employees. These create the level of stress and lack of motivation among the staff of hotel. The third stage or process of conflict in hotel industry is behavior stage. In this stage the conflict that took place in hotel has taken the form of arguments and started using physical force (Simsek et al. 2001). The manifest conflict which includes the obstruction of purpose of other group member or staff resulting in creating conflict takes place at this stage. There are basically five different approaches that can be used by both the conflicting parties in hospitality sector for conflict management like competition, corporation, avoidance, adaptation and reconciliation (Ates, 2000).

The fourth stage or process of conflict is Consequence stage in which the interaction between manifest conflict and conflict management strategy bring the consequences or outcomes. If the conflict helps in improvement of group then it is considered as functional and if it is inhibited then that is not functional (Ates, 2000).

1.2 The management of conflicts

The conflict management may be defined as the more extensive term that conflict resolution. The conflict management includes both reconciliation of conflict and also directing the destructive conflict towards the results of conflicts. The conflict management is expressed as the stage that can be used for diagnosing the conflict as well as determining its intensity in organization (Alp, 1997). The management of conflicts that arises out in a hotel in between the staff and guest or with other co-workers must be done in an accurate manner to avoid any future conspiracy between them. The proper management which can be done by the hotel manager and owner are having some criteria which are listed as below

Improvement and effectiveness in organizational learning: There must be some strategy arises to enhance the organizational learning within hotel industry (Luthans et al. 1995). It will enable the individual to gain critical as well as innovative thinking so that they can be able to diagnose the problem in right time.

Picking right stakeholders: According to the recommendation of (Mitroff, 1998), picking the right stakeholders is useful to solve the right problems. Sometimes it happened that multiple parties are involved in the process of conflict which is one of the challenging factors for the conflict management as it will make them less attracted towards process learning techniques (Afzalur Rahim, 2002).

Ethical management: According to (Mitroff, 1998), who is the strong advocate for the ethical management concluded that a wise leader must be able to behave ethically with all the staffs or members. The leader must be able to open for any new information and able to change his or her mind state. In order to manage the conflict ethically the hospitality sector should institutionalize the position of every employee advocate, suppliers advocate and also customer advocate.

Open communication: It is the duty of manager to clear any undesirable conflict at the right time. The study which is conducted by the Elton Mayo and others in between 1927 and 1932 concluded that the conflict can arises from various non functional consequences such as lack of clarity, lack of sensitivity by managers towards the needs and request for workers in hotel sector and also poor trust between staff (Sevket et al. 2015). Thus the manager must be able to interact with each individual and share the motivation and objectives individually with each of them.

Adequate training to staff for using appropriate conflict management strategy: There are various styles used for behavior which can be used to deal with conflicts in organization like integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding and compromising. Thus the organizational members or staff needs to get on-job experience or training to select the appropriate style of handling conflict (Afzalur Rahim, 2002).

1.3 Finding from previous studies

According to the study of "Sevket et al. 2015", the conflicts between the staff and guest in a hotel can be solved or management of conflict can be done by leaving the decision to higher management and any expert or third party must interfere if the manager or staff is not able to solve the conflict. Even if the conflicts arise because of scarcity in human resource then the resource must be increased by appointing or outsourcing more staff in hotels.

The survey is done by the researcher Mohamad Sepehri et al. 2014, which is qualitative in nature, and content analysis method is used as some documents were compared with other. It is done with the aim to understand the actual reason for conflict and how it is managed. The four to five-star hotels were selected from Ankara and the actual sample size was about 10 in which seven are five-star and 3 was 4-star hotel (Sepehri et al. 2014). Thus a total of 10 businesses were interviewed as in order to keep the information confidential the names are not revealed in the journal. The findings from the interview are summarized as below

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Lack of proper communication in between the staff and departments are mostly responsible for the conflicts.

The frequency of high conflict is higher during high-season period in region hotels.

The conflicts might ends with the positive results like timely intervention, noticing and anticipating the problem or in negative manner like productivity slowdown, labor loss and many others.

The years of working experience for the hostel employees was responsible for the dealing with the conflicts in hotel.

Reference List

Afzalur Rahim, M., 2002. TOWARD A THEORY OF MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL CONFLICT. International Journal of Conflict Management, 13(3), pp.206-235.

Sepehri Mohamad, Batman Mohamad, Kıngır Said and Arpaci Özgür, 2014. A survey review in conflict management strategies: The case study for selected hotels in Turkey. pp. 1-10.

Yirik, s. and Yõldõrõm, B., 2015. International Journal of Arts & Sciences, pp.77-88.