Leadership in Hospitality Industry

Leadership in Hospitality Industry

Introduction

In the beginning of this report it would be essential to say what leadership is and its history. According to James MacGregor Burns,

“leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth” (http://www.emeraldinsight.com).

The study of leadership has been important to humans since the dawn of the civilization. The concepts of leadership, leader, and follower are represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics written 5000 years ago. Between 400 and 300BC the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle wrote about leadership and the requirements, characteristics, and education of leaders

(http://www.emeraldinsight.com).

Leadership is central to the human condition (Wren, 1995) and has been found to be important to all societies, although specific patterns of behavior vary over time and across cultures (Bass,

1990)(http://www.emeraldinsight.com).

Although we can see that leadership is being an ancient notion there was no evidence of existence of the word leadership in the English language until the yearly nineteenth century. According to Bass (1990), the appearance of the concept of leadership in political, sociological, and organizational writings was usually accompanied by a unique and ambiguous definition

(http://www.emeraldinsight.com). Bryman (1992) defines leadership as “a social process in which leaders influence followers to achieve group goals”. Although leadership described in many cases as a process, most of the theories and researches look at the person to understand the nature of leadership.

History of leadership

Leadership can be defined by three phases:

. Leader’s traits

. Leader’s behaviors; and

. Leader’s qualities

From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s, leadership research focused on identifying traits that distinguish leaders from non- leaders (http://www.emeraldinsight.com). As example we can see Stogdill’s review of the leader trait research.

This research was based on the idea that leaders were born, not made, and the key to success was simply in identifying those people who were born to be great leaders (http://www.emeraldinsight.com). Nevertheless a lot of work was done to identify the trait, the research failed to identify a universal set of traits that differentiated effective leaders.

In the early 1950s a second major thrust appeared. This thrust looked at leader behaviors in an attempt to determine what successful leaders do, not how they look to others (Halpin and Winer, 1957)

(http://www.emeraldinsight.com).

Two primary, independent factors were identified by these studies:

. Consideration; and

. Initiation structures.

“The impact of this work was in part the notion that leadership was not necessarily an inborn trait, but instead effective leadership methods could be taught to employees” (Saal and Knight, 1988). A lot of progress was made in identifying what behaviors differentiated leaders from followers so that the behaviors could be taught (http://www.emeraldinsight.com).