A suggested best practices for enhancing performance of soft skills with entry-level hospitality managers

ABSTRACT

As the nature of hospitality requires employees’ having interpersonal or personal skills, the development of such soft skills has become one of the major topics among hospitality employers. The purpose of this research is to expand the findings of previous research on soft skill competencies and develop a practical model to assess differences between the importance and performance of soft skills. Importance/Performance Analysis was used to examine the differences in the perception of soft skills between managers and employees. An aggregate importance soft skill score of an HR expert was plotted with an aggregate performance soft skill score by an employee. This model further proposes using radial graphs to give individual feedback about soft skill competencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft skills
• performance management
• management development
• importance-performance analysis
• hospitality managers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melvin R. Weber

Dr. Melvin R. Weber is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.  I have industry and academic experience, and research interests include human resource management, performance assessment, personality, and leadership.

Junghoon (Jay) Lee

Junghoon (Jay) Lee is an Associate Professor in the School of Hospitality Leadership at East Carolina University. Dr. Lee’s research centers on hospitality organizational behavior including emotional labor, customer service orientation, service sabotage, and cultural intelligence. Before moving into academia, Dr. Lee held various positions at the lodging and food service companies in the United States and South Korea, including General Manager, Director of International Operations, and Human Resource Director.

Alleah Crawford

Dr. Alleah Crawford’s research interests includes soft skill development of hospitality employees and students.  She works to apply her soft skill development research into the classroom through service learning opportunities.