Organizational Culture at Gaylord Palms Convention Hotel

LED 560 Case 4
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Organizational Culture
Section 1- Introduction
Different organizations have distinct ways of operating, including how they communicate, treat their employees, and relate with their customers. That specific way of doing things in an organization represents its culture. Culture is integral in organizations, and it performs significant functions. First, it is worth noting that due to the dynamism of the market world, organizational culture should not be static; it should be versatile to adapt to emerging trends. These may include new competitors or demands from customers (OCAI, 2010). Organizational culture has a powerful impact on organizations' performance and long-term effectiveness. In addition, it significantly influences employees' morale, satisfaction, commitment, and innovation. Concisely, organizational culture impacts daily behavior and the performance of organizations. This paper explores the extent to which organizational culture has contributed to the overall success of Gaylord Palms Convention Hotel.
Section 2- Organizational Culture at Gaylord Palms Hotel
The hotel was founded in 2002 in Orlando, Florida. The owners allowed the founding manager autonomy to craft a culture that would enable the hotel to deliver top-quality service at a profit. Based on his prior experience, the manager resolved to formulate and implement a coherent and inspiring culture (Ford et al., 2008). Consequently, the culture has helped the hotel offer excellent services to its clients. Similarly, it has helped nurture a friendly work environment that has significantly consolidated employee satisfaction. As a matter of fact, Gaylord Palms has a turnover rate of 28 percent, which is noticeably insignificant compared to its competitors in the hotel industry, whose notoriety for high employee turnover is well documented. The success of the hotel’s culture lies in its outstanding components.
The first component of the hotel’s culture establishes its mission, goals, and values. It also provides guidelines on how the hotel should offer its services. Second, the hotel’s culture outlines the process of hiring, training, and motivating employees. The third component of Gaylord Palm’s culture revolves around formulating appropriate communication systems to constructively communicate the establishment’s culture (Ford et al., 2008). In a word, the hotel's culture ensures that the employees are empowered and given the requisite support to help them offer excellent services to customers. This has tremendously contributed to making the hotel one of the most preferred establishments in the hotel industry since it provides absolute meaning to the members.
How Gaylord’s Culture Creates Meaning to its Members
The culture of Gaylord Palms was crafted to make the hotel’s objectives clear and outline how to achieve them. In this regard, the culture explicitly intimates that it endeavors to have a competitive edge over its competitors by offering the best services possible. To achieve this, the culture minimizes supervision of employees and guides their behavior, especially when they encounter unique situations (Ford et al., 2008). The founding management appreciated that managers could not always be present in such circumstances. Therefore, allowing employees to decide the right thing to do would be critical. This trend inevitably makes employees feel more valued and enhances their motivation. In addition, the hotel's culture informs its members about the values they should espouse. To this end, the founding management invented an acronym, STARS, which defines what employees should focus on when doing their work. In addition, the values remind employees that each individual adds some value to the hotel.
Further, the hotel adopts a hiring culture that ensures only those who adequately qualify for different positions get them. The culture also creates room for the training and orientation of new employees. These programs are meaningful to employees since they enable them to understand and adapt to the hotel’s culture. It also equips them with the necessary skills to help them discharge duties with distinction.
Of equal importance, Gaylord’s culture improvised communication systems convenient to all its members. The communication channels emphasize two-way communication and pave the way for employees to voice their concerns and views. It also ensures that correct feedback gets to them most appropriately. By and large, communication at Gaylord Palms accords all members an elevated sense of belonging, which enhances their commitment to helping it excel.
How Gaylord’s Culture Establishes Informal Organizational Controls
At Gaylord, the culture ensures that employees feel good about themselves with the hope they will transmit the good feeling to others. In other words, the culture encourages all its members to cultivate and maintain robust interpersonal relationships. As a result, the environment at the hotel is marked with heightened proportions of positive emotions. Since the employees are happy and satisfied, they reciprocate by cultivating solid relationships with the hotel’s customers, which ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction.
In addition, Gaylord’s culture creates ample space for informal communication among employees. First, the hotel has a variety of rituals and celebrations that scale up relationships among employees. For instance, when employees get a promotion, they are wheeled around in a rickshaw by their new supervisors as a way of celebrating (Ford et al., 2008). A camera-toting paparazzi follows the bike while waving a celebratory sign and making some noise. Such celebrations lighten up the general mood of all people, thereby improving interpersonal relationships. The hotel also hosts family nights whose fundamental aim is to entertain. When there is something special to see, the hotel invites all its employees to bring their families. Similarly, the hotel facilitates members to celebrate life events, such as birthdays. To a considerable extent, these informal organizations have enabled the hotel to make giant steps toward realizing its strategic goals.
How Culture Ensures Success of Gaylord’s Srategic Choices
One fundamental strategic goal of the hotel is to enhance customer satisfaction by offering excellent services to them. The founding management understood that achieving this goal would extensively depend on the employees they hired. This makes the second strategic goal, which is to nurture a friendly work environment, intricately interwoven with the first. To achieve excellence, the founding management acknowledged the need to tailor a culture that would entail a solid commitment to the welfare of employees. Therefore, the cultural content woven into the lives of the hotel’s employees aims to instill learning among them (Ford et al., 2008). The learning involves getting insights from colleagues, customers, and the results of performance. The cultural content is also geared toward achieving continuous improvement and organizational trust among employees. The advancement of employees is critical because what works today may not necessarily work in the future (Osborne & Hammoud, 2017). To achieve employee enhancement, the hotel grants discretion in doing their jobs, which is crucial because customers come with unique and varying preferences every day. In addition, the management listens and considers ideas for improvement presented by the subordinates. In essence, Gaylord's culture motivates its employees to work toward achieving its strategic goals.
Section 3- Salient Values & Relationship of Values to Culture
Gaylord’s Most Salient Values
One of the most conspicuous values Gaylord espouses is excellence, and it aligns with its culture. The founding management of the hotel intended to give it a competitive edge over its competitors. This would entail offering excellent services to their customers, thereby escalating their satisfaction. Indeed, from the outset, the hotel endeavored to become a legend by offering legendary services (Ford et al.,2008). To achieve this, it conducted the hiring process to ensure the employees hired would contribute significantly toward making it excellent. In addition, it offered training and orientation to help the new employees acclimatize and understand how to discharge their roles with distinction. In a word, the hotel seeks to provide personal and quality service, attend to detail, and do the right thing.
The other core value is respect, which means every member is accorded due respect regardless of their position. According to Rogers and A...