Q3. Please read the following case and answer the questions given at the end. Starting as a single hotel in a Paris suburb in 1995, the Hotel Paris is now a chain of nine hotels, with two in France, one each in London and Rome, and others in New York, Miami, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. As a corporate strategy, the Hotel Paris’s management and owners want to continue to expand geographically. They believe doing so will let them capitalize on their reputation for good service, by providing multicity alternatives for their satisfied guests. The problem is, their reputation for good service has been deteriorating. If they cannot improve service, it would be unwise for them to expand, since their guests might prefer other hotels after trying the Hotel Paris.Several things are complicating their problem. Tourists increasingly stay at short-term rental apartments (often through sites such as airbnb .com) for a fraction of what fine hotels cost. In 2018 Airbnb agreed to more stringently comply with the limits on the lengths of rentals in the heart of Paris, but not elsewhere. Marriott recently acquired the Starwood hotels chain (including many brands such as Ritz-Carlton) and will present increased competition. And the election as French president of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 prompted widespread optimism among many in France regarding the country’s growth prospects, but also the possibility of some labor strife, at least in the short run.The StrategyTop management, with input from the HR and other managers, and with the board of directors’ approval, chooses a new competitive strategy and formulates new strategic goals. It decides: “The Hotel Paris International will use superior guest services to differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stays and the return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitability.” All Hotel Paris managers—including the director of HR services—must now formulate strategies that support this competitive strategy.The Strategically Required Organizational Outcomes The Hotel Paris’s basic strategy is to use superior guest services to expand geographically. For HR director Lisa Cruz, reviewing the hotel’s activities makes it clear that achieving the hotel’s strategic aims means achieving a number of required organizational outcomes. For example, Lisa and her management colleagues must take steps that produce fewer customer complaints and more written compliments, more frequent guest returns and longer stays, and higher guest expenditures per visit.The Strategically Relevant Workforce Competencies and Behaviors The question facing Lisa, then, is this: What competencies and behaviors must our hotel’s employees exhibit, if we are to produce required organizational outcomes such as fewer customer complaints, more compliments, and more frequent guest returns? Thinking through this question helps Lisa come up with an answer. For example, the hotel’s required employee competencies and behaviors would include, “high-quality front-desk customer service,” “taking calls for reservations in a friendly manner,” “greeting guests at the front door,” and “processing guests’ room service meals efficiently.” All require motivated, high-morale employees.The Strategically Relevant HR Policies and Activities The HR manager’s task now is to identify and specify the HR policies and activities that will enable the hotel to produce these crucial workforce competencies and behaviors. For example, “high-quality front-desk customer service” is one such required behavior. From this, the HR director identifies HR activities to produce such front-desk customer service efforts. For example, she decides to institute practices to improve the disciplinary fairness and justice in the company, with the aim of improving employee morale. Her assumption is that enhanced fairness will produce higher morale and that higher morale will produce improved front-desk service.The Strategy MapNext, Lisa, working with the hotel’s chief financial officer (CFO), outlines a strategy map for the hotel. This outlines the cause-and-effect links among the HR activities, the workforce behaviors, and the organizational outcomes.This map and its linkages reflect certain assumptions on Lisa’s part. For example, based on experience and discussions with the firm’s other managers, she formulates the following hypothesis about how HR affects hotel performance: Improved grievance procedures cause improved morale, which leads to improved front-desk service, which leads to increased guest returns, which leads to improved financial performance. The HR director then chooses metrics to measure each of these factors. For example, she decides to measure “improved disciplinary procedures” in terms of how many grievances employees submit each month. She measures “improved morale” in terms of “scores on our hotel’s semiannual attitude survey,” and measures “high-quality front-desk customer service” in terms of “customer complaints per month.”She moves on to quantifying the cause-and-effect links among these measures. For example: “Can we show top management that there is a measurable, sequential link between improved disciplinary procedures, high morale, improved front-desk service, number of guest return visits, and hotel financial performance (revenues and profits)?” If she can show such links, she has a persuasive case that shows HR’s measurable contribution to the hotel’s bottom-line financial performance.In practice, the HR manager may well just rely on a largely subjective but logical argument to make the case for such cause-and-effect linkages. But ideally, she will use statistical methods such as correlation analysis to determine if measurable links exist, and (if so) what their magnitudes are. In this way, she might find, for instance, that a 10% improvement in grievance rates is associated with an almost 20% improvement in morale. Similarly, a 20% improvement in morale is associated with a 30% reduction in customer front-desk complaints. Furthermore, a 30% reduction in complaints is associated with a 20% increase in guest return visits, and a 20% increase in return rate is associated with a 6% rise in hotel revenues. It would appear that a relatively small HR effort in reducing grievances might have a big effect on this hotel’s bottom-line performance!Several things complicate this measurement process. For example, it’s risky to draw cause–effect conclusions from correlation measures like these (do fewer grievances lead to higher morale, or vice versa?). Furthermore, it’s rare that a single factor (such as grievance rates) will have such effects alone, so we may want to measure the effects of several HR policies and activities on morale simultaneously.Computerization could enable Lisa to build a more comprehensive HR scorecard process, one that might handle links among dozens of cause-and-effect metrics. (Several vendors supply such scorecard software.) If not, then she will rely more on the logic and common sense underlying the strategy map to make her case.How We Will Use the Hotel Paris Case A Hotel Paris case in each chapter will show how Lisa, the Hotel Paris’s HR director, uses that chapter’s concepts and techniques to: (1) create HR policies and practices that help the Hotel Paris, (2) produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs, and (3) to produce the customer service the Hotel Paris requires to achieve its strategic goals.For example, she will endeavor to improve workforce competencies and behaviors by instituting improved recruitment (processes Chapter 5), and measure improved recruitment in terms of “number of qualified applicants per position.” Similarly, she will recommend to management that they change the company’s pay policies, so that the “target percentile for total compensation is in the top 25%.” She could argue, based on competitors’ experience, that doing so will translate into improved customer service behavior, more satisfied customers, and improved hotel performance. In practice, all the human resource management functions we discuss in this book influence employee competencies and behaviors, and thereby organizational performance.Q3b. Summarize in your own words an example of the hierarchy of links among the hotel’s HR ¬practices, necessary workforce competencies and behaviors, and required organizational outcomes.

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Workforce competencies refer to the specific skills, knowledge, abilities, and behaviors that…