Management - Spiderweb - Tourism & Hospitality - Assessment Answer

Management Assignment

Assignment Task

The first quadrant shows that I perform fairly in facilitating open discussions for conflict resolution. I identify group differences that could raise contention, but work to find a solution to them. I also encourage participation in seeking solutions to group conflicts. The results show that I am an attentive listen to people's problems and I express sympathy to people's problems which I believe is essential in solving conflicts. The second quadrant indicates that I perform fairly well in clarifying the need to achieve goals. From the results, I am also a results-oriented manager. I put adequate focus on ensuring that units produce the results expected from them by pushing them towards their targets. We can see that I also continually clarify the purpose of the unit and monitor its performance against expected results.

The third quadrant shows that I may need to improve my coordination skills. It shows that I am quite poor at maintaining tight logistical control. I am also poor in predicting workflow scheduling conflicts and streamlining them. However, I am keen on what happens with the units ensuring high compliance levels. I also perform remarkably at checking and correcting errors. Inefficiencies in some operations can trade off the gains made in other processes which will reduce the general organisational effectiveness (Divyaranjani & Rajasekar 2014). Therefore, I felt that there was a greater need to improve the monitoring of all processes.

The fourth quadrant shows that I can bring new ideas to the table and that I continually search for innovative ways of dealing with situations. However, it also shows that I am quite poor at mediating between options to find the best solution to a problem. From the results, it seems that I may need to improve on my mediation skills to achieve more effectiveness in executing my managerial roles. Innovativeness is always a desirable and necessary property in the management of any organisation as it is a key component in facilitating process improvement which is a key focus area of organisational effectiveness (Francis, Holbeche & Reddington 2012).

As a manager, reflecting on how effective your organisation is in achieving its organisational outcomes is an important step towards achieving those outcomes. Development of leadership, management of talent, using technology to enhance processes, establishment of scorecards and organisational design are among the key areas a manager would be looking at (Upadhaya, Munir & Blount 2014). As a manager, I would be interested in balancing reliability and quality in one or more the focus areas as well as accelerating the growth of capacity of both the human resource and other management processes. In general, organisational effectiveness goes beyond financial performance of the company to include effectiveness of any other processes that can be deemed as contributing to the achievement of an organisation's outcome (Wang, Le & Tran 2015). A manager needs to embrace a holistic approach to process improvement and the view of organisational effectiveness.

Nevertheless, as a manager I need to separate realistic objectives from ideal objectives (Nankervis, Stanton & Foley 2012) and pursue the realistic ones based on our current organisational disposition and environment. A combination of all these factors ensures achievement of managerial targets plus associated options.

PART B

In this section, this report attempt to identify competing values, paradoxical views and complementary models pointed out by the community of MTLs Blog 2. A Master Manager in a Tourism and Hospitality organisation must posses some essential competencies to enable them to lead the organisation in achieving its set outcomes. We shall discuss some of the elements mentioned above linking to their importance in management functions within a tourism and hospitality organisation.

Control systems and their purposes were discussed in the Community Blog 2. Essentially, a control system is a tool for guiding an organisation to meet its organisational outcomes within given constraints. The nature of organisational constraints varies widely from one organisation to another (Robbins et al. 2013), but all organisations have constraints that are unique to them and may need to apply control systems at some point. Controls can limit or enhance effectiveness depending on how “expert” they are applied. They can be used as thresholds beyond which, or below which, operations or processes should be clipped. In a dynamic industry such as the tourism and hospitality sector where variables can fluctuate radically, control systems may be more than just necessary. Generally speaking, control systems are a necessary tool in the management of any organisation (Engel & Lente 2014).

Alignment of the control system with the organisation's goals and objectives was identified as an important dimension of the tool. Indeed, control systems should be strictly guided by the organisation's objectives. In the management of tourism and hospitality organisations, managers need to identify the goals of their organisations before establishing an appropriate control system. For example, managers need to identify the marketing objectives of their organisation before applying control filters on marketing management. If control does not apply to such operations as marketing management of a tourism or hospitality organisation, many things, including budget and deadlines may overrun the expectations (Riley 2014). On the other hand, applying controls before determining the organisational objectives could also mean that the controls may prevent you and your team from ever achieving the goal. Therefore, the key principle here is basing the control system for identifying organisational goals and objectives.

Flexibility of the control system came out as one paradoxical view of control systems. First, they are controlled because they are limited in nature; but then, they are also expected to be flexible. While this view may seem to contradict itself, it does not present any contradiction at all. Control systems are established to enforce certain constraints on the management operations (Su, Baird & Schoch 2015); but no management operation is solidly predictable. It therefore demands that as the controls are formulated to enforce constraints, they should only do so within the boundaries of reasonable flexibility. For example, a hospitality manager may have set control systems in their marketing operations that monitor their normal marketing operations. But an emerging business opportunity may arise that would require going beyond what is considered normal operations. In such a case, it would only be reasonable that the control system allows flexibility; something that it normally should not. Therefore, flexibility should be integrated into the core design of every control system.

The importance of the timeliness of the corrective actions prescribed by a control system became apparent as well. Control systems should provide immediate remedies to processes that seem to go off-course. However, since immediate action against erroneous processes might not always be possible (Bedford & Malmi 2015), control systems should provide the next best timely option. Timeliness of remediation prevent situations from falling down a slippery slope and possibly multiplying the effects of hazards. Other values of the control system identified include the quality of being unbiased, easy comprehension and the availability of backup actions. A control system that is unbiased is likely to attract faster adoption by the employees. Backup remedies are useful when the scope of the situation is beyond what the control system was designed for; such as an unforeseeable emergency.

In conclusion, objectivity, flexibility and timeliness stood out as among the most relevant values and views of a control system. It became apparent that an effective control system must take into account the outcomes of the organisation. It should also be flexible enough to allow sudden necessary changes to be accommodated by the organisation and not be prevented from occurring by the controls. Lastly, the controls should offer timely corrective actions on recurring problems.