Contemporary Leadership Techniques: Workforce Diversity

The essay explains workforce diversity as a contemporary leadership issue in the hospitality sector and put forth the challenges that face future leaders in this industry.

Running head: CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP 1
Contemporary Leadership Techniques: Workforce Diversity
Student Name
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What is contemporary leadership in hospitality? What will be the challenges facing future
leaders of this industry?
The concept of leadership is a major issue of debate in the hospitality industry. Today’s
hospitality sector is influenced by contemporary world complexities that relate to economic,
cultural, social, and environmental dimensions. The business environment in which hospitality
firms operate has turned to be highly competitive, and this requires the companies to establish
unique strategies of consistently gaining a competitive advantage against rivals (Abbasiyannejad
& Silong, 2015). Leadership influences organizational performance. In this regard, workforce
diversity is a major contemporary leadership issue in the hospitality industry of today. Workforce
diversity entails the employment of employees whose knowledge, age, gender, race, and cultural
backgrounds differ. Enhancing workforce diversity is significant and relevant in the today’s
hospitality industry. The essay will explain workforce diversity as a contemporary leadership
issue in the hospitality sector and put forth the challenges that face future leaders in this industry.
Enhancing workforce diversity holds key to Australian hospitality industry success.
Research shows that high quality staff is a perfect ingredient to hospitality industry success.
Leaders of hotels and big restaurants need to ensure that the employees they recruit have age,
gender, race, and cultural background diversities in order to boost performance. Employees both
the young and aged employees in the hospitality sector ensure skills retention and transfer of
innovative ideas from one age group to another (Fassinger, 2008). Recent research shows that
most Australian hotels depend on multicultural workforce to maintain their position,
sustainability, and competitiveness in the market. The manner in which these employees are
treated is an important ingredient towards hotel success. Currently, good employees admire to
work for hotels and restaurants that value their efforts, ideas, opinions, and viewpoints. A

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discriminative, bias, and prejudice environment demotivates and kills employees’ morale to
perform. In this perspective, managers have to treat all employees equally.
New research by Saxena has revealed that hotels that embrace diversity of cultures, age,
ethnicity, and gender among the workforces succeed in the industry (Saxena, 2014). Enhancing
workforce diversity has been proved beneficial to both the company and employees. While
workplace personnel form the most important asset of a firm, hospitality industry players
generate policies and initiatives of managing workforce in a fair and equitable manner.
Employees’ motivation through equal and fair remuneration, promotions, and rewards motivates
them to perform better. As a result, creativity and innovation of new ideas is enhanced. The most
recent innovations and service improvements in the hospitality sector are a direct reward of
embracing workforce diversity (Pitts & Recascino Wise, 2010). Also, talent growth and retention
is enhanced for employees have different ideas and opinions that they share with one another.
The environment to serve hotel customers is friendly, and this enables companies to thrive.
The success of hospitality industry depends on the nature and quality of customer
services offered by the employees of a firm. Managing employees’ diversity in terms of expertise
greatly contributes to success in customer services. The hospitality industry is mandated to offer
customers with 24-7 hour customer services in order to enhance profitability and
competitiveness. However, only qualified and diverse workforces are able to achieve this goal.
Hospitality industry players understand that effective management of diversity improves
customer services. Workforce development in terms of training needs to be fair and equitable to
all employees. The proper development of employees’ abilities across all diversities creates a
strong base in which they understand varying customers’ base needs; as a result, a competitive

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advantage is gained. Employees able to communicate across cultures understand customers’
needs easily, hence improved quality of customers services.
In this contemporary business environment, successful management of workforce leads
to improved creativity, innovation, decision making, and problem solving in the hospitality
sector. Team effectiveness depends on the diversity employed by the leadership when forming
the groups. Embracing workplace diversity in terms of age and race establishes a unique
experience in the hospitality industry since employees freely interact, socialize, and share ideas
that lead to new innovations (Garnero, Kampelmann, & Rycx, 2014). For instance, the
innovation of online booking for food and accommodation in the industry succeeded after
intense consultations among different employees of diverse skills, experiences, and cultural
backgrounds. Important to note, the technologies updated and used in hotels have helped in
creativity and innovation of employees. International hospitality players benefit greatly on
workforce diversity since migrants overflow in these hotels and some of the customers prefer to
be served by people from their national origin (Syed & Kramar, 2009). In this regard, the
management makes a decision on the employees to welcome new visitors from different
companies in order to boost sales.
Also, the success in hospitality industry entails effective management of hospitality
services. The most common hospitality services include tourist services, visitor attractions,
holiday parks, accommodation, catering services, and club membership. Recent research in
Australia suggests that the industry offers a variety of jobs in restaurants, hotels, and cafes. Being
a competitive industry, where customers prefer to visit the only companies offering top quality
services- enhancing employees’ diversity is mandatory (Steers, Sanchez-Runde & Nardon,
2012). Equity and fairness is required when employing these employees by the HR departments.

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The language of employees is a major issue of concern, and greatly impacts on the performance
of a company. The human resource management is required to be sensitive and keen on the
skills, talents, attributes, values, ethics, and professionalism of employees before hiring them.
Issues of racial, gender, age, and ethnic prejudice need to be avoided in the selection process.
The best strategy of differentiating services effectiveness in the hospitality industry is
valuing employees. Valuing workforce diversity motivates and encourages employees to create
and increase more value to the industry by offering more advanced services to customers,
visitors, and guests (Wrench, 2016). A strong reputation in the industry is built by the quality of
services employees provide to the target customers. Diverse staff management strategies need to
be inclusive, fair, and equitable to all diversities in terms of age, sex, race, and ethnicity (Okoro
& Washington, 2012). In this doing, a company keeps guests happy, and this increases its
reputation in the industry. Staff from diverse backgrounds helps in resolving the challenge of
lack of proficiency when communicating to customers from varying backgrounds, and this
makes it easy in communicating with the guests.
However; hotels, cafes, and restaurants have updated technologies and tried to minimize
costs by all means, but recruiting the best out of staff remains a challenge for most players in this
sector (Pitts, 2009). In this regard, future leaders will be facing various challenges of workforce
diversity as they endeavor to operate in the hospitality industry.
To begin with, conflict of interest among genders, ethnicities, age groups, and races have
the potential to pose dire problems to future leadership and management of workforce diversity
in the hospitality industry. Even today, some managers and supervisors show lack of confidence
among team members; and keep on rotating them from customer care, waitress, cashiers, chef,

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and other departments of the company (Jonsen et al., 2013). Racial prejudices in the global arena
due to differences in color also pose a major threat to performance and success of future
managers in the hospitality industry. Also, the perception by some hospitality managers that the
ideas, viewpoints, and perceptions of junior staff are wrong and irrelevant in decision making
holds a huge potential to conflicts among the staff and management. In future, if this distrust and
lack of confidence among team members by the managers persist; productivity and service
delivery will go down.
Another potential challenge to hospitality managers in this sector is inability to cope with
technological demands in the market. Guests, visitors, and customers are demanding high quality
services and innovations in terms of accommodations, foods, and other services. In this regard,
competitors invest in new technologies to improve service delivery to customers hence increased
competitiveness in the market (Greene& Kirton, 2015). In particular, digital interaction between
the companies and the customers worry most of managers in this industry. It is projected that by
2030, customers will demand prompt response and delivery for their requests and offers no
matter the means they use in contacting a restaurant or hotel. The problem will arise since most
competing firms will be investing more in new technologies and getting more technologically
diverse at the expense of employees.
Also, resistance to change is another workforce diversity challenge that will give future
leaders headache in the hospitality sector. Until today, some hospitality companies have not
accepted diversity of workforce in the workplace. As a result, there is bias, discrimination, and
prejudice when hiring new employees in the industry (Herring, 2009). In this doing, unethical,
untidy, and unprofessional hotel servants are employed. At the same time, other hospitality
companies are getting more diverse in terms of workforce. There is a huge gap created between

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these two instances. In this regard, any leader employed in a company that has been resistant to
workplace diversity changes and wishes to introduce the change will find it difficult to achieve
this goal. At the end, the companies will lose competitiveness in the industry hence failure.
Further, negative attitudes and harassment in the workplace provokes danger to future
leadership and management in the hospitality industry. Future leaders will find it difficult to
alleviate the negative attitudes and perceptions formed against a certain gender, ethnic group,
and race by the present leaders since this has been the norm (Deckard, 2009). Harassment of
employees will lead to mass resignation, poor customers’ services, damaged market reputation,
and lose of competitive power by such hospitality companies in the market. Where a company
has not been valuing the disabled employees, this will be difficult to change- hence provoking
negative performance of the industry.
Additionally, wage rate and structure of compensating employees in the hospitality
industry will also be a major concern and problem to future leaders. Due to technological
advancements and investment of huge capital outlay in technologies, setting a wage structure that
is favorable and acceptable to all diverse workforces will be difficult (Cherry & Jacob, 2016).
The increased demand of quality services forces companies to invest in modern hospitality
technology, and most diverse workforces have been highly creative and innovative. Setting the
right and acceptable rewards to them is a major headache, since even the selection of the most
profitable and viable innovation is also difficult to the leaders. The wage structure in this sense is
difficult to design.
Furthermore, changing laws and regulations by the government about workplace
diversity and performance of business operations in the hospitality industry also remain a

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potential threat to future managers of this sector. Future hospitality industry leaders will be
coupled with hostile government laws that interfere with internal human resource policies about
employees’ recruitment, selection, and hiring. For example, minimum wage rage might be set at
a level that not all industry operators will be able to meet due to market forces. Also, other
policies that require gender rule might interfere with the performance and operations of the
industry (Bolden, 2016). In this regard, future leaders will find it difficult to manage finances
especially when rewarding top performers. Other policies that cut across the entire sector set by
the government will also interfere with the future leaders’ policies and strategies of enhancing
workforce diversity and equity in the workplace.
In conclusion, workforce diversity plays a major role in boosting organizational
performance. Embracing age, gender, racial, academic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds helps in
enhancing workforce diversity in an organization. Workforce diversity enhances capacity
development, talent retention, creativity and innovation, and improved employees morale hence
increasing performance in all dimensions. In particular, the hospitality industry greatly benefit
from workforce diversity through improved quality of customers services and delivery of instant
24-7 customer support hence improving productivity of a company. The increased
competitiveness in the industry requires all hospitality companies to embrace diversity in the
workplace so as to boost performance, competitiveness and sustainability in the market.
However, due to resistance to change, diversity conflicts, discrimination, and harassment; the
future of hospitality industry management is threatened. Therefore, hospitality managers should
embrace total workforce diversity in the workplace so as to boost talent retention, creativity and
innovation, as well as overall performance and competitiveness in the industry.

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