An investigation of the relationship between different leadership styles and productivity : the food & beverage department at the Belaire Suites Hotel, KZN

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between leadership styles and productivity within the food and beverage department of the Belaire Suites Hotel, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. The focus of the study was on leadership, whilst employee satisfaction was perceived as one of the measures of productivity. The identified understanding of the relationship between the mentioned variables will assist leaders of the Belaire Suites Hotel to understand their role towards the failure or success of the establishment in reaching the targeted levels of productivity. The study used the census sample method. The target population of the study entirely consist of 28 Food and Beverage department employees. 23 of the employees are general workers while the 5 employees are supervisors and managers. The general workers data collection and analysis adopted the quantitative and qualitative study method while the supervisors and managers data collection and analysis adopted the qualitative study method. Meaning that, for the current study, the researcher adopted a mixed research methodology approach. It was found that participative, directive, delegating, authority-compliant, and transactional leadership styles were dominant at the Belaire Suites Hotel. Furthermore, it was found that there was little positive impact perception by general employees on the leadership styles existing at the Belaire Suites Hotel while leaders perceived that they make good attempts for positive impact. It was recommended that leaders need to take care of their employees so that they can impact customer satisfaction and sales. Various recommendations were provided by employees including the provision of incentives, rewards, employee pieces of training, user-friendly systems, customer recognition, and customer preferences. An integrated framework was developed to help improve the levels of productivity at the Belaire Suites Hotel. It is essential that the Belaire Suites Hotel evaluate its leadership styles to positively affect productivity. To satisfy objective one of the current study, a new leadership style termed the “wheelbarrow leadership style” was proposed by the researcher. The author further provided supporting statements as to why such a leadership style is needed at the Belaire Suites Hotel’s food and beverage department and other establishments with the same settings. For objective two, it was recommended that the Belaire Suites Hotel management try and create systems that would monitor the impact of leadership styles adopted by the food and beverage department leaders. The recommendations provided for the third objective were extracted from the validated integrated framework. Respondents recommended that leaders should take care of their employees by means of providing rewards for their performance to positively impact customer satisfaction and sales.