تاثیر فرهنگ ملی و فرهنگ سازمانی متعادل بر عملکرد صنعت هتل Influence of national culture and balanced organizational culture on the hotel industry’s performance

1. Introduction We examine the roles of national culture and balanced organisational culture in the hotel industry, which are key factors influencing performance. This study addresses a problem which managers face in any industry whose customers have globalised standards of expectation, which is to identify what factors have an impact on organisational performance. For the last three decades organisational scholars have been concerned with culture because they believe organisational culture affects performance (Lee and Yu, 2004). However, it is generally acknowledged that culture works on a number of different levels and the organisational level is only one (Pizam, 1993). In the context of globalised industries it is relevant for managers, especially those of multi-national corporations operating in different regions, to be aware of the effect of national culture. This study extends previous studies which have shown that organisational culture affects performance (Prajogo and McDermott, 2011; Lee and Yu, 2004) and that national culture affects organisational culture (House et al., 2004; Nazarian et al., 2014). The hospitality industry has a number of large players that operate globally setting expectations in the market as a whole for their customers, many of whom travel globally (Teare 1993; Hsieh and Tsai, 2009). Also, the industry has a large number of internationally mobile personnel who have to adjust to different cultures (Li and Tse, 1998; Devine et al., 2007). Additionally, managers in the industry experience different operating conditions in different countries giving rise to the paradox of how much of a local approach should be taken versus how much from the industry’s global experience (Jones 1999; Brotherton and Adler, 1999; Jones and McCleary, 2004). For these reasons, we investigate the effect of national culture on organisational culture and subsequently on organisational performance in the hotel industry.We argue thatthe national culture of hotel employees influences the organisational culture which, in turn, influences performance and, thus, there is an indirect influence of national culture on performance. 2. Research approach No studies to date have investigated the relationship between national culture, organisational culture and performance in the hotel industry (Tajeddini and Trueman, 2008). Previous studies, that were not industry specific, have investigated the impact of organisational culture on performance (Kotter and Heskett, 1992) and the impact of national culture on effectiveness (Nazarian et al., 2014). Chen et al. (2012) argue that most studies of hotel managementthatinvestigatenational culture incross-cultural studieshave compared national cultures in relation to various organisational level issues such as franchising operations or pricing strategy. However, there is a lack of research on the impact of national culture on other cultural levels, including organisational culture (Groseschl and Doherty, 2000; Chen et al., 2012). The location where the data were gathered for this study is one where there is a large hotel sector and a large number of both internal and international customers. The possible complication of the respondents not necessarily originating in the location where the data were gathered is overcome by gathering data on national culture at the individual level (Dorfman and Howell, 1988) so that it is the effect of the individuals’ own national culture, whatever that may be, that is being measured. The data for the study were collected from managers and employees of 98 hotels in London, UK. Respondents were asked to complete a questionnaire with items on national culture, the current state of their organisations’ cultures and aspects oftheir organisations’ performance related to organisational effectiveness, learning and growth and customer orientation.