The Spirit of Hospitality

You may not be particularly religious, but this article is a compelling perspective on the hospitality industry and very thought provoking. Although I've adapted and shortened this, it's still long, yet worth the effort....

"The Christian humanization of work: job satisfaction in the hospitality industry."
by James Spillane written in 2001 for Review of Business

The tourism sector is the largest industry in the world. Today it is estimated to provide about 255 million jobs and amounts to 10 percent of world employment. It has now grown into a modern, mature industry where workers are forming their professional identity. These "hospitality professionals" are primarily concerned with customer satisfaction.

Workers in the service sector find the fruits of their labor are frequently intangible. In some cases, their emotions are involved. One can easily broaden management guru Peter Drucker's concept of "the knowledge worker" to include "the emotion worker," who must deal with people on a more interpersonal level. In our modem, service-oriented society, there is a need for literature devoted to the special needs of this kind of worker, especially in the area of "spirituality of work"

By its very nature, hospitality work has a spiritual dimension. Of all industries, it is the most intensely interactive, with people serving people and providing comfort, sustenance, conviviality, transport, amusement, enlightenment, employment and much more. Given the complexity of human behavior, concerns about the work's spiritual dimension can be neither ignored nor hidden. For this reason, perhaps the most challenging of all hospitality industry problems today is not so much job satisfaction as a proper spirituality of work.

In short, the challenge is to help hospitality professionals find genuine meaningfulness in their work.

Spirituality of Work

Today people are less and less sure about what "work" really means. Their expectations of work, especially getting it and enjoying it, are now matters of both deep anxiety and mundane reality. There are several reasons for this. First, there are high unemployment rates in industrialized societies. For many people in modern society, work is no longer something that happens in a fixed place during a fixed unit of time, producing a fixed output and reward (5). Come points out how societies frequently define human beings in terms of the work they perform (7). The question "what do you do?" is a central one in many people's lives.

Religion teaches that work is its own reward, and that it will lead a person toward the virtuous life, if not salvation. Work is the natural course of action a human follows to find his or her role, niche, position, and the shape of his or her soul. Therefore, steady employment, a life in which one's lot continually improves, sits as the cornerstone of rational and calculable human action. It may well be the cornerstone of physical and mental health as well. How can it not shape the nature of spirituality?

It is in the work and working that a person's consciousness takes shape and life reveals its meaning. For it is in working that a person believes he or she has made sense of life's mystery and has found reasonable ways to avoid vexing metaphysical questions. For the content and structure of a person's consciousness, story and spirit remain his or her work, or lack of it.

Faith and the World of Work. Wright points out that many contemporary Christians experience some discomfort when they seek to relate their faith to the world of work, especially the work of wealth creation in industry, commerce and other services (27). The workplace is perceived as a Godless and even immoral part of their human condition. As a result, many people feel the need to find consistency between their work and the rest of their life.

Why should one be concerned with the relationship between faith, work, and the world of wealth creation and provision of services? First of all, work is where most people spend a great deal of their time. Second, the creation of wealth and provision of services are the processes whereby all people survive on this earth, since they serve to satisfy their needs and wants.

Finally, and most important, there is a unique Christian truth and revelation: the Incarnation. Christians believe that, in Jesus, God became human at a particular moment of time and lived on this same earth that we inhabit. Jesus was very much involved in the world of work of his day. Many of his stories came from everyday life and the workplace. The world of work and wealth creation is very clearly part of God's creation, and God took part in these very activities. Hence, there is a need to relate them to our Christian beliefs and to face up to any discomfort we perceive and feel in doing so.

The Nature of Spirituality

Spirituality has become a broad, inclusive term that is no longer confined to, or defined by, religion. It names a human reality difficult to define but whose patterns can be verified in quite different religions and movements. Spirituality now focuses on the human spirit of believers and non-believers in their lives as a whole; that is, on the physical and emotional, the intellectual and social, the political and cultural, and the secular and religious dimensions of their lives.
According to Thompson, a person's spirituality is individual and collective, and reflects how a person responds to God's initiative while facing the challenges of everyday life within his or her specific historical and cultural environment (25).

Faith, Love and Hope Replace Obedience. According to Regan, personal development of healthy human qualities occupies a more central position in one's personal outlook toward spirituality today (19). Accepting what is authentically human leads people to use their native talents, creative expressions and heightened personal initiatives. On the other hand, anything that dehumanizes a service provider or "receiver" in the hospitality industry is viewed as unChristian. This approach allows more emphasis on an individual's personal response of his or her religious and inner values, both human and Christian. Empowerment, decentralization, co-responsibility and subsidiarity become the new hallmarks of what was once viewed as religious "obedience."

With today's personal response-to-inner values approach, there's a greater emphasis placed on personal responsibility and individuality. In this approach to the spiritual life, a person is viewed as entering a profession or a community to develop oneself fully in the service of Christ and neighbor, to put one's full talents at the disposal of people, and to take part in and share responsibility for the Church and for the community itself. Rather than obedience, selfless charity becomes the primary Christian virtue. Life itself is seen as a response of love to God and in the neighbor in accordance with Jesus' teaching. This approach seems particularly appropriate for hospitality professionals, whose training now emphasizes their empowerment to make decisions by themselves.

It is not easy to affirm the dignity of work and the worker when the characteristic form of work in an industrial society is symbolized by the assembly line. Repetitively carrying out a mechanical task gives faint image of the worker as a sharer in God's creative activity. It was much easier to promote the Christian vision of labor in a pre-industrial society when the dominant form of work was a craft, with the worker involved in the entire production process. The same is true of work in the service sector, including the hospitality industry.

New work structures, therefore, pose challenges, but also offer opportunities. To be efficient, the new workplace requires employees to take pride in their work and each other, and promoting such feelings can provide multiple benefits for any manager. It fosters loyalty toward the firm and one's fellow workers. At the same time, the experience of building solidarity vindicates a traditional Christian understanding of the dignity of the human person. For Wright, the starting point for a Christian perspective on the world of work is Teilbard's divinization of human activity (27). The Incarnation substantially strengthens that perception, showing that the tension and paradox in the human condition are part of our working lives.

Work is an act of self-giving directed toward the good of others. Work consists primarily of cultivating and care, in bringing forth new life. Work should basically be a joyful activity, even though it often entails fatigue and pain. Don't forget, though, that rest and leisure are good, too, and are, in their own way, integral to the work process.

Spirituality of Work for Hospitality Professionals

There are many qualities of life rooted in the example of Jesus, with three basic qualities specifically reflecting Jesus' life of hospitable service to others: responsiveness, competence and respect.

Underlying Jesus' desire to serve those in need were sensitivity, adaptability and willingness that are today basic building blocks for an apostolic spirituality of hospitality. Sensitivity to the situation at hand is essential if a hospitality professional's response is to be effective. Adaptability to the situation as it changes is also essential if their response is to be appropriate. Willingness to be involved is essential if their response is to be consistent Ultimately, the driving force behind this responsiveness is compassion, which is not the same as pity. The true core of compassion is the urgency to act. Compassion never merely observes; it initiates and interacts. In Jesus' work, compassion is second only to love. On the other hand, when personal benefit becomes the primary goal of service in the hospitality industry, this compassion gives way to conceit.

Competence shapes the overall effectiveness of our response. However sensitive, adaptable and willing that response maybe, its lasting effect must reflect competence. Service industries require a level of competence quite different from that in agricultural or manufacturing work. The hospitality industry revolves around two separate realities: material variables and personal variables. Material variables differ among the various areas of the hospitality industry, but they generally include some common elements. First, there is a body of living knowledge, with new information replacing old on a regular basis. (I use the word "living" in the sense of growing and changing.) Second, there are natural or acquired skills that enable hospitality professionals to use their knowledge. Third, there are the willingness, capacity and commitment to acquire new and refined skills to match developments within the field of knowledge now called hospitality, leisure or tourism studies. Finally, there are resources necessary for hospitality professionals to use skills with knowledge. Personal variables for hospitality professionals include the personalities, preferences and predicaments of those they serve.

Respect is characterized by a hospitality professional's recognition of each person's uniqueness. It is their affirmation of the dignity of each person, a dignity based on their creation as God's image and likeness, as well as their efforts to listen, communicate and interact through ways and means consistent with that uniqueness and dignity. Work in the hospitality industry brings professionals to encounters and interactions with many people. Respect reminds them that, regardless of what they have to do in the work of hospitality, the value of a human being can never be compromised.

The driving force behind respect is love. Christian spirituality should acknowledge the goodness of all that is human. Emotions, sexuality, temperament, personality and the prayer life should all enter into the Christian response of the whole person. Development and fulfillment of these truly human aspects should be incorporated into any authentic approach to the Christian spirituality of work in the hospitality industry.

Job Satisfaction in the Hospitality Industries

The "rational" parts of any organization put a high value on efficiency. All jobs and tasks should be designed to achieve the organization's goals as efficiently as possible. Jobs are specialized along two dimensions: horizontally (restricting the range of different tasks) and vertically (restricting the range of control and decision-making over job activities). Job specialization is most obvious at the operating levels of organizations. However, highly specialized work can injure the well-being of workers and thus poses an important problem of justice for employers (for example, unskilled workers without freedom of choice). Such injustice can actually lead to decreased productivity.

On the other hand, there is a significant link between worker productivity and programs that improve the quality of the work life of workers by giving greater involvement in, and control over, a variety of work tasks. Velasquez [26] points out that there are two determinants of job satisfaction:

1. Experienced Meaningfulness. The individual must perceive his or her work as worthwhile or important by some system of values he or she accepts.

2. Knowledge of Results. The worker must be able to determine, on some regular basis, whether or not the outcomes of his or her work are satisfactory.

To influence these determinants, jobs must be expanded along five dimensions:

1. Skill Variety. The degree to which a job requires the worker to perform activities that challenge his or her skills and abilities.

2. Task Identity. The degree to which the job requires completing a whole and identifiable piece of work -- doing a job from beginning to end with a visible outcome.

3. Task Significance. The degree to which a job has a substantial and perceivable impact on the lives of other people, whether in the immediate organization or the world at large.

4. Autonomy. The degree to which the job gives the worker freedom, independence and discretion in scheduling work and determining how he or she will carry it out

5. Feedback. The degree to which a worker, in carrying out the work activities required by the job, gets information about the effectiveness of his or her efforts.

Traditionally, employees have relied on their supervisors for task guidance and good feelings--especially consideration and being treated like adults in order to perform their jobs both well and happily. Schneider and Bowen point out that when employees do not get this from their supervisors, they may turn to customers as "substitutes for leadership"

(20). Customers may be given a say in designing the organization that produces the goods and services. With services, it's often possible--and desirable--for customers to actually participate in production.

But the problem is that customers are not subject to the same kinds of fears, commitments and structures as employees, so they are very difficult to manage. To best capitalize on customer competencies, management must be able to:

1. Explicitly determine exactly what role/job they want their customer to perform.

2. Ensure that customers have what it takes to perform their jobs well through role clarity, ability and motivation.

3. Regularly appraise customer performance.

Service customers also often play the roles of directors, guides and even "order-givers" for employees. Customers play a dual leadership role by providing employees with guidance and providing them with positive feelings. There are two reasons. First, the employees' supervisors tend not to provide the guidance and good feelings they should. Second, customers of service firms feel they have a right to give orders. Employees like the positive feelings they receive from customers but do not like customers telling them what to do.

The lesson here is fairly simple but too often overlooked: Feedback is a critical part of job enrichment. Service firms need to think creatively about how to respond to these opposite reactions to customers' leadership behaviors. Customers can be trained to be a source of good feelings for employees and, at the same time, socialized to limit task direction over employees. Although management may have great "legitimate influence" over its employees, service work puts employees closer to their customers and, therefore, more involved with the kinds of rewards they receive and the distribution of those rewards. When a hospitality enterprise meets the various needs of employees through rewards--dispersed equitably and fairly--customers will experience superior service quality as well.

Combining Job Satisfaction with Spirituality for Hospitality Professionals

Mainardi has pointed out that hospitality professionals are dependent on contact with, and reception of, the public (14). Therefore, they presuppose some degree of availability toward the client, a considerable margin of initiative and a generally strong sense of personal responsibility. In fact, employees in the tourist transaction play an intermediary role between the industry's structure and its clientele. This role is particularly decisive in achieving the results desired by both sides. AM these situations are undoubtedly favorable to bearing witness to the spirit and practice of the Gospel before others.

The hospitality professional's conduct is not only circumscribed by the material manifestations of the tourist industry. It must also be determined by psychological and ethical factors aimed at completely satisfying the tourist's wishes. Tourists want to be treated differently--better--than they are normally treated in their daily routines (e.g., with tradesmen, fellow workers, etc.). Furthermore, there is substantial evidence that customers like to interact directly with people in the tourism trade, not machines. This is also unavoidable, since providing tourist services without human assistance remains inconceivable.

This contact with the hurried or solitary traveler enables tourist professionals to reveal their own personalities--both as expert and human being--responding to each client's unique wishes via their own mental attitude, manner, initiative and creativity. The human person is truly the central and fundamental point of the tourism industry, with the economic aspect clearly secondary.

Simon used the concept of satisficing behavior to accommodate the balancing act of achieving multiple objectives in human behavior (21). Normative economics fails to include some of the central problems of conflict and dynamics. Simon attacks the hypothesis that firms strive to maximize profits for three key reasons: (1) The theory leaves ambiguous whether it is short-run or long-run profit that is to be maximized; (2) The entrepreneur may obtain all kinds of "psychic income" from the firm apart from monetary rewards; and (3) the entrepreneur may simply want to earn a satisfactory return, not looking to maximize gains. Simon points out that "economic man" is a satisficing animal whose problem-solving is based on his or her search to meet certain aspiration levels, rather than a "maximizing animal" whose problem-solving involves finding the best alternatives in terms of specified criteria This is certainly true in the case of the hospitality professional who seeks job satisfaction rather than merely looking to maximize salary.

The true mark of hospitality professionalism is excellence on the technical level and fellowship toward the client on the moral level. Such a global commitment involves a wide range of material services and mental attitudes in welcoming, guiding and assisting the tourist It also opens up more far-reaching horizons to practice Christian witness in so many privileged circumstances--in the form of personal contacts, conversations, exchanges of view, good conduct, etc. Nevertheless, this world also brings a lot of "baggage" with it for most people in the tourist and similar industries. Such difficulties include stress, high anxiety, burn out, low social status, feeling like a "hired host," low pay, tensions between career and one's personal and family life, as well as high turnover and mobility.

In professional activity, a concrete and unmistakable sign of integrity is to observe professional ethics. In other words, professionals should conduct their business honestly--giving clients the right amount of service and goods proportionate to their requested price. Whether you're talking about a travel agency or a tour company, a hotel or a restaurant, personal service must focus on the needs of the beneficiary of hospitality--i.e., the client Specifically, the 10 dimensions of service quality are: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding/knowing the customer, and tangibles that include the physical evidence of the service.

Generally speaking, hospitality clients are not equipped with the controls and consumer protections many other customers enjoy when they purchase industrial products. With the exception of large-scale fraud, it is, in fact, very difficult for clients to contest the quality of tourist goods or services purchased. In the majority of cases, the tourist client is thus put in an inferior position. That's why it's all too easy for hospitality professionals to "swindle" and behave in unjust and dishonest ways. This is a recurrent risk faced even by the well-intentioned, and one that can only be dispelled if the will to bear witness is cultivated systematically in the depths of the individual conscience.

Regard toward the client's "person" can--and should--be demonstrated by imbuing him or her with a sense of psychological and physical well-being, and by being willing to serve. Customers should also benefit from: material protection of their person and possessions, the constant good functioning of the tourism facilities, professional correctness and an effort by service providers to achieve maximum standards of hygiene (in food and environment). Modern managerial conduct should also aim to overcome the "coldness" and lack of intimacy typical of bureaucratic organizations. What's more, the influence exerted by hospitality managers and their staff may play a significant role in "educating" clients in the use of tourism, whether aimed at recreation or any creative endeavor. In the words of Paul VI, we should strive to "humanize and spiritualize tourism."