Understanding and Managing Individual and Group Behaviour, and Organisation Structure and Design: Personality, Perception, Learning, Values, Attitudes and Persuasion, Motivation, Groups, Teams, Communication, Leadership and Influence, the Elements of Structure, Common Organisational Designs and the Organisation as an Open System
1. Individual behaviour: personality, perception, learning, values, attitudes and persuasion
Personality is the relatively stable set of traits and characteristics by which a person reacts to and interacts with others. The Big Five model groups traits into openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (its opposite is emotional stability), remembered as OCEAN; conscientiousness predicts job performance across many jobs, and extraversion and agreeableness suit guest-contact roles. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people into sixteen types on four pairs: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. Julian Rotter's locus of control separates internals, who believe they control what happens to them, from externals, who credit luck or others; and the Type A personality is hurried, competitive and impatient, the Type B relaxed.
Perception is the process by which people organise and interpret sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment, and people act on what they perceive, not on reality. Attribution theory (Harold Kelley) explains how we judge whether behaviour is internally caused (by the person) or externally caused (by the situation) using three cues: distinctiveness (does the person behave this way in other situations?), consensus (do others behave the same way in this situation?) and consistency (does the person behave this way over time?). The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate situational and overestimate personal causes when judging others; the self-serving bias credits our successes to ourselves and our failures to circumstances. Shortcuts in judging others include selective perception, the halo effect (judging on a single trait), contrast effects, stereotyping and projection. Front office and restaurant staff meet guests of many cultures, so training against stereotyping is part of service quality.
| Topic | Key ideas |
|---|---|
| Learning | A relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience; classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov: a neutral stimulus paired with one that produces a response comes to produce it), operant conditioning (B. F. Skinner: behaviour followed by reward is repeated, shaped through positive and negative reinforcement, punishment and extinction) and social learning (Albert Bandura: learning by observing models, as trainees copy an experienced guide) |
| Values | Basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state is preferable; Milton Rokeach's survey lists eighteen terminal values (desired end-states, such as a comfortable life or freedom) and eighteen instrumental values (preferred means, such as honesty or courtesy) |
| Attitudes | Evaluative statements about objects, people or events, with cognitive (belief), affective (feeling) and behavioural (intention to act) components; job satisfaction, job involvement and organisational commitment are the work attitudes studied most; Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance (1957) is the discomfort felt when attitudes and behaviour conflict, which people reduce by changing one of them |
| Persuasion | Changing attitudes by communication; the elaboration likelihood model (Richard Petty and John Cacioppo) has a central route, careful weighing of arguments when the listener is motivated and able, and a peripheral route, reliance on cues such as the speaker's attractiveness or credibility; Robert Cialdini's principles of influence are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity, all visible in travel selling ("only two seats left at this fare") |
2. Theories of motivation
| Theory | Core idea | Hospitality application |
|---|---|---|
| Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1943) | Five levels, physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualisation; a satisfied need no longer motivates, and higher needs come into play as lower ones are met | Staff meals and accommodation meet lower needs; recognition schemes such as "employee of the month" meet esteem needs |
| Alderfer's ERG theory (1969) | Existence, relatedness and growth needs; more than one can operate at once, and frustration of a higher need can lead a person to regress to a lower one | A cook denied promotion may demand more pay instead |
| Herzberg's two-factor theory (1959) | Hygiene factors (company policy, supervision, salary, working conditions, relations with colleagues) prevent dissatisfaction but do not motivate; motivators (achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement, growth) produce satisfaction | Fair pay and decent rosters avoid complaints; responsibility and recognition motivate |
| McClelland's needs theory | Need for achievement, need for affiliation and need for power, learned and differing between people; high achievers like moderate risks and feedback | Sales staff with high achievement need respond to targets |
| Vroom's expectancy theory (1964) | Motivation depends on expectancy (effort will lead to performance), instrumentality (performance will lead to reward) and valence (the value of the reward); it is often written as the product of the three, so if any is zero motivation is zero | A bonus no one believes is attainable does not motivate |
| Adams's equity theory (1963) and Locke's goal-setting theory (1968) | Employees compare their ratio of outcomes to inputs with others' and act to remove inequity; specific, difficult goals that are accepted, with feedback, raise performance more than "do your best" | Unequal service-charge sharing breeds resentment; a target of a guest score of 90 beats a vague appeal |
3. Groups, teams, communication, leadership and influence
A group is two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who come together to achieve objectives; formal groups are set by the structure (a housekeeping shift), informal groups arise from friendship and interest. Bruce Tuckman's model (1965) describes groups forming, storming, norming and performing, with adjourning added in 1977 for temporary groups such as a tour's escort team. Factors affecting group behaviour include the group's size (larger groups risk social loafing, individuals putting in less effort when working collectively), roles, norms, status, composition and cohesiveness; highly cohesive groups perform well only when their norms support the organisation's goals, and they risk groupthink (Irving Janis), the pressure to agree that suppresses dissent. The individual dimension, each member's personality, skills and needs, interacts with these group dimensions.
A work team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort, so its performance exceeds the sum of individual inputs; a work group only shares information. Stephen Robbins lists four common types: problem-solving teams (members from one department who suggest improvements, as quality circles), self-managed work teams (which take on their supervisors' responsibilities), cross-functional teams (members from different areas at the same level, as a hotel pre-opening team drawing on rooms, food and beverage, engineering and sales) and virtual teams (members who work across distance through technology). Communication is the transfer and understanding of meaning: a sender encodes a message, sends it through a channel, the receiver decodes it and gives feedback, with noise able to distort each step. It flows downward, upward and laterally in formal networks, and through the grapevine informally; barriers include filtering, selective perception, information overload, emotions, language and cultural differences, all acute in multilingual tourism workforces.
| Leadership approach | Key ideas |
|---|---|
| Trait theories | Leaders are born with traits such as drive, integrity, self-confidence and intelligence; the search found no set that always distinguishes leaders |
| Behavioural theories | Ohio State studies: initiating structure (defining roles and tasks) and consideration (trust and respect for followers); Michigan studies: employee-oriented and production-oriented leaders; Blake and Mouton's managerial grid, with the 9,9 "team management" style high on both concern for people and concern for production |
| Contingency theories | Fred Fiedler: effectiveness depends on matching the leader's style (measured by the least preferred co-worker scale) to the situation; Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's situational leadership: telling, selling, participating and delegating as followers' readiness grows; Robert House's path-goal theory: the leader clears the path to followers' goals |
| Transactional and transformational | Transactional leaders exchange rewards for performance; transformational leaders (James MacGregor Burns, 1978, and Bernard Bass) inspire followers to transcend self-interest through charisma, inspiration, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration |
Leadership is an influence process, and influence rests on power. John French and Bertram Raven (1959) named five bases of power: legitimate (from the position), reward (from control over rewards), coercive (from the ability to punish), expert (from skill or knowledge) and referent (from being admired and identified with). The first three are formal, tied to the post; expert and referent power are personal and go with the individual. A respected executive chef's authority in the kitchen often rests more on expert and referent power than on his title.
4. Organisation structure: its elements, and strategy and structure
Organisation structure defines how tasks are formally divided, grouped and coordinated. Robbins identifies six key elements, and the syllabus names all of them. Work specialisation (division of labour) breaks a job into steps each done by a different person, which raises efficiency up to the point where boredom and fatigue cut it. Departmentalisation groups jobs by function (rooms, food and beverage, sales), product or service (inbound, outbound and domestic tours), geography (north and south regions), process (reservations, ticketing, accounts) or customer (corporate, leisure and government travel desks). The chain of command is the unbroken line of authority from the top to the lowest post, clarifying who reports to whom, tied to the principles of authority and unity of command. The span of control is the number of subordinates a manager can direct efficiently. Centralisation is the degree to which decision-making is concentrated at a single point, usually the top; decentralisation pushes decisions down to those closest to the problem, as when a front office manager may approve a room upgrade without referring it upwards. Formalisation is the degree to which jobs are standardised by rules, procedures and manuals, high in a hotel chain's standard operating procedures.
The span of control decides the shape of the structure. With the same number of frontline staff, narrow spans create more levels and a tall structure, with close supervision but slow communication, higher cost and less initiative; wide spans create fewer levels and a flat structure, with faster decisions, lower cost and more autonomy but a heavier load on each manager. Suppose a hotel has 216 frontline staff, each supervisor oversees 6 of them and each manager oversees 6 supervisors: it needs 216 / 6 = 36 supervisors and 36 / 6 = 6 managers, who report to one general manager. If spans widened to 12, the hotel would need 18 supervisors and could put them straight under 2 managers, a flatter and cheaper structure. Alfred Chandler's study of large American firms, Strategy and Structure (1962), concluded that structure follows strategy: as firms diversified, they moved from centralised functional structures to decentralised multidivisional ones, as a hotel company that expands into several brands and countries sets up brand and regional divisions.
5. Common organisational designs, and the organisation as an open system
| Design | Features | Tourism example |
|---|---|---|
| Simple structure | Low departmentalisation, wide spans, authority centralised in one person, little formalisation; fast and cheap but risky, as everything depends on the owner | A small travel agency or homestay run by its proprietor |
| Bureaucracy | Highly routine tasks achieved through specialisation, formal rules, functional departments, centralised authority, narrow spans and decisions following the chain of command; efficient for standardised work but rigid | A large railway organisation or a government tourism corporation |
| Matrix structure | Combines functional and product or project departmentalisation, creating a dual chain of command in which staff report to a functional manager and a project manager; flexible but it breaks unity of command and can cause power struggles | A MICE or mega-event project team drawing staff from sales, operations and finance |
| Virtual (network) organisation | A small core that outsources its major business functions to other firms and coordinates them | A tour operator that owns no coaches or hotels and contracts transport, rooms and guides |
| Boundaryless organisation | A term associated with Jack Welch at General Electric: it seeks to remove the chain of command, have limitless spans and replace departments with empowered teams, breaking vertical, horizontal and external boundaries with suppliers and customers | An online travel company working in fluid teams with partner hotels and airlines through shared systems |
| Feminine organisation | Described by Robbins, drawing on feminist writers, as an alternative to bureaucracy: it values members as individuals, is non-opportunistic, defines careers by service to others, is committed to employee growth, creates a caring community and shares power | Community-run tourism cooperatives and service-centred organisations come closest |
An organisation is an open system: it depends on its environment for inputs and markets, and the environment shapes its internal dynamics. Burns and Stalker's finding that stable environments suit mechanistic and dynamic ones organic structures applies here, and so does technology. Joan Woodward's studies of English manufacturing firms classified technology as unit, mass and process production and found each suited a different structure; later writers generalised the point that routine technology fits formal, centralised structures and non-routine technology flexible ones. Technological innovations have reshaped tourism organisations: computer reservation systems and global distribution systems centralised inventory; the internet and online travel agencies disintermediated parts of the travel trade and let small hotels sell directly; mobile apps, self-check-in kiosks and revenue management software changed front office jobs and flattened some layers; and remote work and cloud systems made virtual teams normal. Organisations that treat these changes as signals from their environment and adapt their structures survive better than those that do not.
Key takeaways
- Personality is summarised by the Big Five (OCEAN), the MBTI's sixteen types, locus of control and Type A or B; perception is explained by Kelley's attribution cues (distinctiveness, consensus, consistency) and distorted by the fundamental attribution error, halo effect and stereotyping.
- Learning is classical (Pavlov), operant (Skinner) or social (Bandura); Rokeach lists eighteen terminal and eighteen instrumental values; attitudes have cognitive, affective and behavioural parts, with Festinger's dissonance; persuasion follows central or peripheral routes and Cialdini's six principles.
- Content theories are Maslow (five needs), Alderfer (ERG), Herzberg (hygiene factors and motivators) and McClelland (achievement, affiliation, power); process theories are Vroom (expectancy, instrumentality, valence), Adams (equity) and Locke (specific, difficult goals).
- Groups form, storm, norm, perform and adjourn (Tuckman); size, roles, norms, status and cohesiveness shape them, with social loafing and groupthink as risks; teams are problem-solving, self-managed, cross-functional or virtual; leadership runs from traits and behaviours to contingency (Fiedler, Hersey-Blanchard, House) and transformational models, resting on French and Raven's five bases of power.
- Structure's six elements are work specialisation, departmentalisation, chain of command, span of control, centralisation and formalisation; narrow spans make tall and wide spans flat structures; structure follows strategy (Chandler 1962); designs are simple, bureaucratic, matrix (dual command), virtual (outsourced), boundaryless and feminine, and as open systems organisations must adapt to environment and technology.
Practice questions (10)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
In Herzberg's two-factor theory, which of the following is a hygiene factor rather than a motivator?
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Answer: D — Salary
Salary, supervision, company policy and working conditions are hygiene factors that prevent dissatisfaction. Recognition, achievement, responsibility, the work itself and advancement are motivators.A travel company announces a large bonus for reaching a sales target that the staff believe is impossible to reach. Vroom's expectancy theory predicts weak motivation because
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Answer: C — expectancy, the belief that effort will lead to the required performance, is close to zero
Motivation depends on expectancy, instrumentality and valence together; if staff think no effort can reach the target, expectancy is near zero and the attractive reward does not motivate. Hygiene factors belong to Herzberg and affiliation to McClelland.A resort has 216 frontline staff. Each supervisor oversees 6 frontline staff and each manager oversees 6 supervisors. How many managers does the resort need?
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 6
Supervisors needed are 216 / 6 = 36, and managers needed are 36 / 6 = 6. Widening the spans would reduce the number of supervisors and managers and flatten the structure.An events company assigns a sales executive to a conference project team for six months; she reports both to the sales head and to the project manager. This is a feature of the
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Answer: C — matrix structure
The matrix combines functional and project departmentalisation, giving a dual chain of command and breaking unity of command. The simple structure centralises authority in one person, and the virtual organisation outsources major functions.How many stages are there in Tuckman's model of group development after adjourning was added in 1977? Give the number.
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 5
The stages are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning, five in all; the original 1965 model had the first four.Which of the following are among the six key elements of organisation structure identified by Robbins and named in the syllabus? Select all that apply.
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Answer: C — Span of control; D — Formalisation
The six elements are work specialisation, departmentalisation, chain of command, span of control, centralisation and decentralisation, and formalisation. Culture and motivation are important but are not elements of structure.A head chef whose cooks follow him because they admire him and want to be like him is exercising which base of power in French and Raven's scheme?
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Answer: D — Referent power
Referent power comes from being admired and identified with, and it is personal rather than tied to the post. Legitimate, reward and coercive power come from the formal position.Assertion (A): Alfred Chandler concluded from his study of large firms that structure follows strategy. Reason (R): Chandler found that firms first choose a structure and then design a strategy to fit it.
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Answer: C — A is true, but R is false
A is true and R is false. In Strategy and Structure (1962) Chandler found that firms changed strategy first, by diversifying, and then changed their structure, moving to multidivisional forms; R reverses that order.Which of the following are process theories of motivation, explaining how motivation works rather than what motivates? Select all that apply.
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Answer: A — Adams's equity theory; C — Locke's goal-setting theory; D — Vroom's expectancy theory
Expectancy, equity and goal-setting theories describe the process by which people choose and sustain effort. Maslow's hierarchy is a content theory, identifying the needs that motivate.A tour operator keeps only a small head office for product design and marketing, and contracts all coaches, hotels, guides and ticketing to other firms. Its organisational design is best described as
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Answer: C — a virtual (network) organisation
A small core that outsources its major business functions and coordinates the partners is a virtual or network organisation. A bureaucracy performs routine work in-house through specialised departments, and a matrix has a dual chain of command.