EVALUATION OF TEAM WORK IN THE HOTEL INDUSTRY LITERATURE REVIEW

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 EFFECTIVE TEAM MANAGEMENT

Teamwork is the key to modern management and management world wide is realizing the power of a well-veiled team. No longer can decisions be made solely by one person. To hospitality business for example, a wide range of multi-disciplinary skills is often required, ranging from food production, housekeeping, function management, and accounting managers can’t be skilled in all these areas and therefore must rely on teamwork.

Successful manager know that their success depends on the team succeeding. A team is more than a number of brilliant individual advisers it is a group of people who understand each other, who know individual strengths and weaknesses and who c-operate with one another. As Lee Lacocca (1986) put it in the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profit, people come first. Unless yours gets a good team you can’t do much with the other two.

To bring out technical and professional best in team members, it required a system of team management that can be operate on a regular basis. A good leader should be able to carry his team along by doing the following:

1.     Be a directive and confident leader, during the development stages of his team.

2.     Work to reduce member anxiety, tear of rejection and concern about safety.

3.     Provide positive feedback especially during the developing stages when members still exercise fear and anxiety.

4.     Facilitate open discussion of goals, values and tasks.

5.     Facilitate member feelings of competence by providing, supervision, motivation, training and education in task and process related activities.

6.     Set high performance standards and provide guidance as needed.

7.     Manage the external environment for the group.

8.     Facilitate open discussion and resolution of conflicts.

9.     Involve, encourage and support member efforts to share in the leadership function of the group.

2.2  TYPES OF TEAMS

There are teams with various goals and task whose activity cover a wide range of organisation issues. But all these are categorized into two discerning groups namely: Formal and Informal teams.

Formal Team: Within an organized enterprise structure, departments and sections are created with responsibility for doing the basic manufacturing, development, operations, marketing, sales, service and other value –adding activities of a business. With some exception like new product development or process design teams. Formal teams do not  completion dates because their activities  are on-going.

Within a formal team, who distinct teams are easily noticed, teams that make or do things and teams that run things. Teams that do make or do things include productions, marketing, accounting, sales and service teams. These teams are goal oriented and performance driven. The other kind of formal team is the team that run things the composition of this team is usually not more than four and is made up of the most senior executives who may well be the founders and co-founders. This teams ensure that the overall mission statement is vigorously pursed by displaying resources and personal to the company goals. Some examples include whitehead and Weinberg at Goldman, Sachs, Hewlett and Packard at HP, Kendall, Pearson, and Calloway at Pepsi, Haas at Levi Straus.

Informal Team: These teams deal with a particular situation, members have fewer fixed organisational relationships and are disbanded after performing their function. Instance include task forces, project groups, and audit, quality, or safety groups asked to study and solve particular problems. Informal teams almost always shave predetermined completion dates and always give recommendations at the end of their task.

In wider business circle, informal teams and known by other names such as decision teams, task teams and teams that recommend things, (Rickards T. and Mogars, 1999).

2.3  TEAM BUILDING AND DEVELOPMENT

Team building is the process of creating and developing a group of people so that they operate in an effective and efficient fashion, thereby achieving their goals. Building an effective teams follows the stages:

1.       Giving the team clear objectives: Objectives are the targets or goals that a team leader and team members are expected to achieve. Team objectives may be set by management or by an external agency, and must be realistic, achievable, measurable and set within a time scale. The objectives help determine the teams working method, assist in planning tasks, and are an essential guide when performance is being evaluated.

2.       Selecting appropriate team members: No team succeeds without all the skills needed to meet its purpose and performance goals. The wise manager will choose people both for their existing skills and their potentials to improve existing skill and team new ones.

3.       Encourage the development of team member: Successful teams have norms that encourage members to be creative and innovative. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to be successful it members were not expected to perform at high levels.

4.       Evaluate the performance of teams and its individuals members: High performance teams implement the solutions and decisions made by members. That is, members and the leader follow up on those decision and hold each other accountable for acting on those decisions successful team also develop methods of evaluate team solutions and decisions. Decisions may turn out to be in error or inadequate, but, ineffective teams, those errors or inadequacies are caught and corrected quickly.

5.       Providing the team with other necessary resources: The requisite resources and materials needed to help them carryout its tasks effectively should be made available. Where resources are limited the teams should be made to know and their task structured to meet the current circumstances.

6.       Develop a team approach to operations: Teams members should be free to contribute to best methods of approach that would help a team meet its objective. The team should be allowed to come with design solution to problems and given  the freedom to try out new methods.

7.       Communication and feedback: High performance teams have an open communication structure that allows all members to participate. Individuals are listen to irrespective of their age, title, sex, race, ethnicity, profession or other status characteristics. This enhances productivity since all ideas and suggestion get heard. Successful teams also get regular feedback about their effectiveness and productivity. When members are asked to assess the teams effectiveness and productivity, they are able to answer accurately this means members seek feedback from each  other and from external sources about the teams performance.

8.       Leadership in productive teams: The leader’s style changes when necessary to meet emerging group needs. From the first stage to the final stage. The role of the leader gradually charges from that of direct control to delegation of roles. This is possible as the leaders role becomes less directive and more consultative.

9.       Structure: Effective teams contain the smallest number of member necessary to accomplish goals and tasks and no more. Second, the hallmark of a mature more. Second, the hallmark of  a mature team is that members are able to form subgroups in order to get work done third, those subgroups are not perceived  as threatening by other members. Instead, subgroups are accepted and valued for their contribution to the team.

2.4   IDENTIFYING GROUPS AND TEAMS

People have formed 150k groups in order to accomplish goals and tasks since the beginning of human history. The small group, whose members work collectively for their mutual benefit or survival, is the oldest form of social organisation.

Groups have played a major role in both the survival of human beings and the development of human culture, and some would argue that mains ability to work together was, and is, the key to human survival and advancement work groups have a long and remarkable track record of success. From the beginning of human history, people have utilised work groups to generate new ideas, get things done and nature individuals (Wheelan, 1999).

However, with continuous competition in both the social and business climates, it is only sensible that individuals companies  and pool the  synergy of groups of individuals  who can help them achieve their goals. In the age of growing  sophistication in every aspect to the human life,  individual and specifically, corporate goals are driven on the collaborative efforts of work  groups. And when a group becomes effective, functions as team.

It is not enough to have a group of workers and claim to have a group, for group of works function  at variance with a group. A group of brilliant workers may not be as effective as a brilliant group. To develop a group of workers into a group requires group development which ultimately lead to a high performance team. To identity a group from a team, there are some criteria that sets them apart which are discussed briefly in the table below.

Working Group	Team
Strong, clearly focused leader.	Shared leadership roles
Individual accountability	Individual and mutual accountability.
The groups purpose is the same as the broader organisational goal	Specific purpose that the team usely delivers
Individual work-products	Collective work products
Runs efficient meetings	Encourages open-ended discussion and active problem solving meetings.
Measures its effectiveness in directly by its influence on others e.g. financial	Measures performance directly by assessing collective work products
Discusses, decide, and delegates	Discusses, decides and does real work together

To develop a group of workers into a work group, the following stages proceed each other climate into a group.

1.           Dependency and inclusion: The first stage of group development is characterized by member dependency on the designated leader, concerns about safety, and concerns about feeling included. Group members often engage in what has been called pseudo-work, or flight. Members may wait for the leader to make decision and seem more concerned with being accepted by others than with the task at hand.

2.           Counter dependency and fight: At this stage,  group seeks to free itself from its dependence on the leader and members fight among themselves is to develop a unified set of goals,; values, and operational procedure which usually generates conflict,  this is necessary for the establishment of trust and a climate in which member feel free to disagree with each other.

3.           Trust and Structure: When a group works through the conflicts of stage member trust, commitment to the group, and willingness to co-operate increases communication becomes more open and task oriented. Claims on area of professional competence decreases as members focus more on the task and less on issues of status, power, or influence. This stage is manifest by more mature negotiations about roles, organisation and procedures. Members work to solidity positively working relationships with each other.

4.     Work: This stage is characterized by intense team productivity and effectiveness. At this stage the group becomes a high performance team. Having resolved may of the issues of the previous stages, the team can focus more of its energy on achievement and task accomplishment.

Although some work occurs at every development stage, the quality and quantity of work increases significantly during stage 4 and the substances of the groups tempo transform it into a high performance team.

2.5   TEAMWORK IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

        As organisation strive to entrance productivity through effective teamwork, it is interesting to note that teamwork has long been recognized as crucial in the operation of hospitality enterprises. During the research on the topic, information obtained trace the first true success of teamwork in the industry to the legendary French cook, George Auguto Escofficer.

        The kitchen brigade as we know it of Chef de parties, was a system devised and implemented by Escofficer in 1890 prior to this time, kitchens had for centuries been separated into sections but it was Escofficer who devised an organized system, to ensure there was no doubling  of up of work and that things were run organised.

        Along with his partner Cesar Ritzs, who also revolutionized the other departments in a hotel, their success was beyond expectation and renewed hotels all or the world grew out of this famous partnership which brought about the most significant changes and modern development in the hotel industry.

The simplification of business operations has further necessitated the building and management of effective teams to achieve the overall corporate objective. It is preferment to note  that without an effective communication networks even the most grandiose hotels never reach their potentials in attracting the target market.  From the luxury to one star rated hotels with less than 10 employees sections to work in harmony.