The Making of Hospitality Managers: The Role of Knowledge in the Development of Expertise

Abstract

This study examines the nature of hospitality managers’ knowledge when solving typical hotel management problems. In a cross-sectional study, data were collected from first-, fourth-, and eighth-semester students and compared with experts who had seven to ten years of experience working as hospitality managers. Three typical hospitality management cases were used to measure the way in which participants with different levels of education and experience cognitively represented the cases. Participants' recall and problem solving processes were also assessed. Through a method of proposition analysis, the data were scored and then evaluated using one-way analysis of variance. The results point to knowledge as an important element in performance on hospitality management tasks. Hospitality experts' recall and problem solving abilities in this study were strengthened by their rich and broad knowledge base of facts, concepts and inferences which they used to abstract information from the cases and then accurately solve the problem.

KEYWORDS:

• hospitality managerial expertise
• managerial knowledge
• information processing
• cognitive skills and competencies of hotel managers