Analyzing Organizational Culture: A Case Study of Hilton Worldwide

This case study analyzes Hilton Worldwide's organizational culture, focusing on its evolution to meet the challenges of a globalized hospitality industry. The assignment explores how Hilton adapted its culture to align with regional differences, emphasizing the importance of employee attraction, retention, and intercultural communication. The study examines Hilton's shift from a centralized decision-making structure to a more decentralized model that empowers employees and fosters a sense of ownership. The case highlights the challenges of maintaining a consistent corporate culture across diverse locations and the strategies employed by Hilton to address these issues, including prioritizing vision, mission, values, and key priorities. The study also includes recommendations for maintaining and improving organizational culture in a dynamic environment.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE – CASE STUDY HILTON WORLDWIDE
Student name
Student ID number
Module code
Tutor’s name
Word Count,
Date
1

Introduction
The globalized organization needs to adopt an organizational culture that is well suited to
regional cultures (King and Lawley, 2013, pp 195-231). Organizations having ethnocentric
approach often fail to grow and maintain profitability. The hospitality industry is rapidly
expanding with the increasing number of hotels rooms. There is an increase in employees across
the hospitality industry, with employee retention posing the primary challenge. For a large
company employee attraction and retention is crucial to maintaining stable profitability and
growth. Organization culture can ensure the assumption of beliefs, values and interactive ways
for the psychological and social environment (Meyer). The current case company is Hilton
Hotels and way in which it has transformed its organizational culture to match the needs of its
expansion.
Hilton Hotels was established by Conrad Hilton in Texas in 1919 with the Company
headquarters been located at Beverly Hills, California (Hilton International). The Company’s
core strengths have been quality, integrity, strength, and value. The core strengths have enabled
the Company to maintain its 3897 hotels, comprising of 642,000 rooms across 76 countries and
territories. The Company employs 135,000 individuals across the world. The scope of this
current discussion focuses on examining the way in which the Hilton brands maintains its
corporate culture across a variety of services and lodging provided (Hampden-Turner, 2012).
Analysis of Organization Culture across Inter culture
The organization's corporate culture was developed by Hilton himself and it remains consistent
across several cultures, consisting off consistent customer delight, serving the community,
providing innovative products and services, expansion of the family brand, providing healthy and
safer environment to team members and customers, creating a proud culture, and strengthening
the loyalty of the company's constituents. The brand had been expanding and is either company
owned and managed or franchised. The brand has expanded to include Hilton Hotels,
Homewood Suites, Embassy Suites and Hotels, Hampton Inn and Suites, Conrad hotels,
Doubletree and so on. Hilton International had been expanding and growing rapidly with a
strong revenue margin and adjusted EBITDA growth of 13%. Initially, when the brand was
2

established, it was focused upon cost structure and top-line performance, leading to overall
mediocre performance across the brand (Gullestrup, 2009). Later the focus shifted to the brand
then Christopher J. Nassetta, former president and CEO of Host Hotels and Resort prioritized
alignment of the organization and culture across intercultural communication to enhance basic
performance and strengthen and expand the brand name. However his primary focus was on
prioritizing vision, mission, values and key priorities through distributing leadership as attaining
similar principles across all tiers of the organization seemed to be rather difficult (Hammerich
and Lewis, 2013). Therefore, Hilton Group aimed at having a well-established vision, mission,
values and key priorities for more than 300,000 people across 100 countries. The Company thus
envisioned the varied types of employees that it had across various tiers such as managers,
housekeepers and so on and then designed the priorities which employees would easily adapt.
The new culture did not enforce any centralized decision making rather employees were able to
devise their own decisions that were focused upon the priorities. It helped attract a pool of talent
towards the organization (Knights and Willmott, 2007, pp 375-404). Employees started taking
more ownership which eventually led to a cultural revolution across the organization.
The organization transformed from having a centralized decision-making structure to raising
employee awareness regarding the Company. With the brand expanding across various countries
and across various cultures, there was present a centralized decision making culture (Durant and
Shepherd, 2009, pp 147-162). The leaders often designed work steps and policies based on their
cultural understanding. The ethnocentric culture prevalent within the organization deterred
attracting and retaining a pool of talent. Though profitability was on the rise, so was employee
dissatisfaction. Leaders of the organization could not perceive the way in which a more
acceptable framework for leading employees could be devised. Employees often felt burdened
with the huge inappropriate ways of working and functioning at the hotel brand. The new
organizational culture was devised, keeping in mind the experience the Company was willing to
provide its employees, such as creating more opportunities (Needle, 2004). The company's
growth will be depended upon the success with which it is able to bring awareness across
intercultural segments and in applying robust organization culture.
Conclusion
3

Business leaders and heads at Hilton Group found the initial corporate functional culture to be
inconsistent with the growing and merging needs of the organization. The organization needed a
more dynamic framework to operate that could support its transcontinental business. Hilton's
expansion into Asian, Europe, and other countries led to the realization of the cultural challenge
that existed at the organization. Hence, the new CEO devised an organizational culture that was
supported by priorities. It implied that regional leaders were given full freedom to devise their
ways of working and setting priorities accordingly. The objective of the new organizational
culture was to provide ample freedom to employees and leaders in their respective decision
areas.
Recommendations
Large organizations such as Hilton are often difficult to survive and grow amidst dynamic
environment. Rapidly transforming the hospitality industry with competitor's pressure surging
and a large number of a new entrant entering the market poses some critical challenges. Though
Hilton has adopted a culture which can allow attracting employees and retaining them, however,
it needs to review its organizational culture timely to ensure that it continues to maintain its
appeal. By frequently evaluating work satisfaction and employee performance within the
Company it will be possible to maintain a continued organizational culture.
4

References
Durant, A. and Shepherd, I., 2009. ‘Culture’and ‘Communication’in Intercultural
Communication. European journal of english studies, 13(2), pp.147-162.
Hampden-Turner, C., 2012. Riding the waves of culture: understanding diversity in global
business. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Gullestrup, H., 2009. The complexity of intercultural communication in cross-cultural
management. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (6).
Hilton International. Company Profile. Retrieved on Jan, 27th 2019, from
<https://www.hilton.com/en/corporate/>
King, D. and Lawley, S., 2013. Organizational Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
pp195-231
Needle, D., 2004. Business in Context: An introduction to business and its environment.
Andover: Cengage Learning. pp135-158
Knights, D. and Willmott, H., 2007. Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management.
Andover: Cengage Learning. pp. 375-404
Meyer, E., The culture map : decoding how people think, lead, and get things done across
cultures., New York : PublicAffairs.
Hammerich, K. and Lewis, R. D., 2013. Fish can't see water : how national culture can make or
break your corporate strategy., Chichester: Wiley. Trompenaars, Alfons.
5