Contemporary Leadership Techniques: Workforce Diversity

Running head: CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP 1
Contemporary Leadership Techniques: Workforce Diversity
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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.