Stages of Team Development

Discuss about the Hospitality Management.

The report describes about the management problem in Taj Mahal Indian restaurant. It also discusses the stages of team development and the leadership styles. The report also finds whether any structural problem can help the situation and finds out the possible things to encourage, motivate the staff of the restaurant. It discusses about the monitoring tools, which can be used in the areas of production, quality, finance and stock. The report also suggests about any hierarchy changes that can help the restaurant in a long run.

According to Bruce Tuckman there are four stages of group development (Tuckman and Harper 2012)

Forming, storming, norming, performing, are the necessary stages of development of a group. Group development helps to face new challenges, tackle problems, find out solutions, working out plans and deliver the expected result.

In this initial stage, the team members learn about the challenges and opportunities. They start to work on the goal of the company. Team members can work independently in this stage. The members are mostly motivated but they are not aware of the problems of the team. Team members are mostly well behaved but focused on themselves.

This stage discusses about the opinion of the members against other members about their character or other issues related with dominating or shrinking the responsibilities. Before the team members can be progressed out of the stage, divergence and individuality clashes must be solved. However, Tuckman has described this stage as the most difficult since most of the group members try to stay away from this stage.

In this stage, every member of the group has the same ambition and goal. They take up all the responsibility to achieve the goal all together. All the members start believing in each other and try to co-operate (Colombini and McBride 2012).

In this stage, the group members are motivated and well informed that they can handle the decision making process without any administration (Fullan 2014).

Taj Mahal Indian restaurant has two teams namely, the kitchen team and the front house team. The kitchen team is going through the performing stage of the Tuckman’s stages of group development. The kitchen team consists of ten full time workers and two part time workers, more importantly there are eight workers out of them who have been working since the hotel started operating. Therefore, they know each other from the beginning and they can co-operate well not only as an individual but also as a team.

Leadership Styles

On the other hand, the Front house team is experiencing the storming stage of team development, as this team is the non-performing team of the hotel. The service is poor and the maintenance staffs are not well behaved to each other, as most of them are very new and never want to help each other in the problem.

According to Goleman there are six leadership styles that a leader of an organization should follow. The leadership styles can be democratic, commanding, visionary, affiliative, pace setting and coaching (Goleman et al. 2013).

Over the past six years, Jane’s leadership style has been affiliative. This approach has been always useful for setting up a new recruit. The support, warm welcome towards the employee can create a great impact on them. The affiliative leadership style can be used to motivate the team members and resolve any issues (Pundt and Herrmann 2015). In this leaderships style the people or the employees come first. Her leadership quality towards the kitchen staff has been always good, but she has never been impressed with the front house staff. Jane has tried her best to train them but she has failed miserably. As Jane cannot rely on the in house staff, she has to manage everything herself. She does the entire critical task herself. Her leadership style has not changed much because she is still looking for the right employees who can help her in the restaurant.

If I would have been the owner of Taj Mahal Indian restaurant, I would have changed the structure of the personnel. I would have added managers in the hierarchy. Two managers one for the kitchen and one for the front house staff can reduce the work of the owner. The main problem, which Jane addressed as an owner is lack of management. It was really hectic for her to solve every issue and look after everything in the restaurant. because she has been the highest authority of the hotel. Adding a new manager will definitely help the cause. 

Figure1: Organisational Chart

Source 🙁 created by Author)

To encourage, motivate and lead my new staff both individually and as teams I should believe in them, rather than monthly targets I will use small weekly goals, which can be achievable. If not the whole team, I can motivate a single person; however, that person can motivate others. Weekly training can help the employee to understand better. I should always try to understand the problem of the staff, and also offer help if required (Kruse 2012).

Structural Changes

There are so many theories of motivation; Maslow’s hierarchy of need explains the theory of motivation. The hierarchy consists of self-actualization, self esteem, belongingness, safety and physiological needs. (Lester 2013). Self-actualization needs are related to training, growth and creativity. Self-esteem needs are related to recognition and responsibilities, belongingness can be described as teams, clients, and supervisors, while safety can be described as job security and health insurance. Physiological needs are related to survival needs such as air, basic salary and more.

As the new owner of the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant, I need to monitor the four critical areas of production, quality, finance and stock. Production involves the process of producing a product using raw materials. I need to understand how much raw materials will be required in the restaurant, and ensure all of them are always available. Quality describes the feature or the characteristic of the product. The quality should be always good as it can bring more customers in the restaurant. Finance describes about the required capital and other expenses. A budget plan can be made every month to ensure the restaurant can meet the targets.  Stock is related to the inventory of raw materials or finished goods. It is important to check the availability of raw materials every da

Correlsense: Correlsense is a real time user monitoring, which provides the exact experience of the end user. It includes the availability, time of response and the level of services.

HP: HP real user provides the visibility of all the users experience from anywhere in the world, transactions can be done from anywhere, anytime. It has the capability to measure the response time and capture the live sessions. The tool is also capable of rectifying the errors on the transaction pages. It can also see the pages, which has occurred some problems.

Check sheet: It collects the data in the real time from the area where the data is actually generated. It can be quantitative or qualitative. The check sheet is also known as the tally sheet (Agelastos et al. 2016.).

Histogram: It is the graphical illustration of the numeric data’s (Oreifej and Liu 2013).

Finance tools namely pocketsmith, which focuses on the calendar based planning, it helps in tracking the monthly expenses.

Penny minder is used mainly for multiple spenders, it allows to see the details of every member of the organization.

Medved Quote tracker: It can provide streaming of different financial sites and brokers. It provides a lot of data feeds.

Stock Predictor: It describes many technical indicators for the security purpose. It helps in avoiding losing in the stock.

Conclusion

It has found that the owner of Taj Mahal Indian restaurant is dissatisfied with the in house staff. The owner is confused and frustrated. The owner has tried hiring new employees but failed to make them as good as the kitchen staff. Kitchen staffs have been always good and productive. The owner is tired and wants to work less. A change in management will definitely help the owner. Adding two managers will sort out the tasks of the restaurant. The manager can sort out the problem of the employees and directly report to the owner. If required the kitchen staff also can motivate the in house employees. The managers will have the authorization to make any decisions.

References

Colombini, C.B. and McBride, M., 2012. “Storming and norming”: Exploring the value of group development models in addressing conflict in communal writing assessment. Assessing Writing, 17(4), pp.191-207.

Fullan, M., 2014. Leading in a culture of change personal action guide and workbook. John Wiley & Sons.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A., 2013. Primal leadership: Unleashing the power of emotional intelligence. Harvard Business Press.

Kruse, K., 2012. Employee Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance: a” real-world” Guide for Busy Managers. Kevin Kruse.

Lester, D., 2013. Measuring Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Psychological reports, 113(1).

Pundt, A. and Herrmann, F., 2015. Affiliative and aggressive humour in leadership and their relationship to leader–member exchange. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88(1), pp.108-125.

Reeve, J., 2014. Understanding motivation and emotion. John Wiley & Sons.

Tuckman, B.W. and Harper, B.E., 2012. Conducting educational research. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.