Intercultural Human Resource Management In Hotel Chains

In the current global economy, interactions amongst individuals from various nations across the world are now occurring on a daily basis. Although hotels, by the nature of the service they provide, may be considered pioneers in offering and providing global services and managing culturally diverse workforces, many changes have occurred in the business environment of recent years that require increased attention to the issue of cultural differences. Global travel, whether for business or for pleasure, is no longer limited to an educated, upper segment of society that expects, anticipates and delights in experiencing cultural differences as a positive attribute of international travel. Given the labour intensity of hotels and the difficulty associated with staffing unskilled, minimum wage positions, the increasing use of foreign nationals to fill many positions has created a multi-cultural and multi-linguistic workforce in many regions of the world where historically, homogeneous workforces had provided the dominant model. For the hotel industry of the twenty-first century, cultural diversity is a reality that influences the effectiveness of an organisation’s customer relationships, managerial practices and workforce motivation and performance. One of the biggest challenges impacting international human resource management is that of culture