Implementation of The Balanced Scorecard in The Hotel Sector Through Transformational Leadership and Empowerment
Implementation of The Balanced Scorecard in The Hotel Sector Through Transformational Leadership and Empowerment
Implementation of The Balanced Scorecard in The Hotel Sector Through Transformational Leadership and Empowerment
6364
Social and Technological Sciences EISSN: 2341-2593
Palacios-Marqués, Daniel 4
1*
ESIC Business & Marketing School
[email protected] (Corresponding author)
2
ESIC Business & Marketing School
[email protected]
3
ESIC Business & Marketing School
[email protected]
4
Department of Business Aministration. Universitat Politècnica de València,
Camino de Vera s/n, 46022 Valencia, Spain.
[email protected]
Abstract
One of the current problems of the entrepreneurial world is the successful implementation
of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), which is why it is interesting to study the variables that
can influence its application in business. The main purpose of this paper is to establish a
theoretical model through the literature review, that should consider the relationship
between the transformational leadership among company staff (Avolio, Bass and Jung,
1999) and the empowerment of the rest of employees (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990
Spritzer, 1995) upon the achievement of an increased capacity for organizational learning
in the implementation of the BSC in companies (Easterby-Smith & Araujo,1999) from the
following perspectives: financial, customer, business process, learning and growth in major
companies in the hotel sector, specifically in four and five-star hotels.
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic management model (Norton & Kaplan,
1992) that allows the measurement and control of the tangible and intangible objectives
based on the company´s mission and vision statements. The implementation of BSC has a
great influence on the predisposition, training and motivation in middle as well as executive
management through empowerment and leadership, hence the importance of the analysis
of these variables by means of the BSC.
Keywords
Transformational Leadership, Empowerment, Balanced Scorecard
INTRODUCTION
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a very useful tool for the corporate strategic
management as it coordinates the objectives derived from the mission statement with the
active participation of employees through performance indicators. Traditionally,
companies used to analyze only the financial part as an indicator of business value and
made no evaluation of other intangible objectives that defined the orientation of the
company. In the early 90s Norton and Kaplan conducted a study on important indicators in
the case of approximately a dozen companies to finally reach an agreement on the BSC.
It is important to measure the level of customer care in the hotel sector, as well as
that of internal functioning in processes and the business involvement from the point of
view of employee collaboration in the achievement the objectives; and this is the reason
why the application of the BSC in the hotel sector is particularly relevant.
To successfully implement the BSC, a company should rely on a pool of employees
with strong learning abilities and possibilities of personal development in the decision-
making of the company, power and control over aspects of their professional development,
as well as on mechanisms of communication and transmission of information which can
be freely and swiftly consulted, as these three aspects define empowerment. If, in addition,
company leaders act with high ethical standards, inspiring teamwork, encouraging
innovation and creativity, without losing sight of the needs and individual differences as
indicated by transformational leadership, it can be affirmed that the BSC can be
implemented in the company and great results can be obtained out of it.
In short, we try to present a theoretical model that in case of empirical validation
would serve to establish the initial criteria of company analysis in order to infer the best
1. TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP
Leadership is defined as the process of directing and influencing work activities
carried out by members of a group and is recognized as a key component that influences
the overall effectiveness of the company.
The overall concept of this variable is total leadership that Avolio and Bass (2004)
include in the models integrated under the "new leadership” paradigm which is the sum of
the transformational, transactional and laissez faire variables. Bass` significant contribution
is the possibility of measuring transformational leadership, considering that it is the natural
evolution of charisma and it could not be measured until that moment.
In summary, Burns (1978) identified two types of leadership based on the leader-
follower figure with transactional and transformational interactions. The most traditional
transaction creates a leadership that involves an exchange relationship between leaders and
followers, whereas transformational leadership is based on leaders changing their
follower’s values, beliefs and needs, leading to superior performance in organizations in a
time of renewal and change.
Focusing on the topic in discussion, Piccolo and Colquitt (2006) found that
transformational leadership is positively related to the perceived levels of the top five work
characteristics (variety, identity, significance, autonomy and feedback), which were
connected to the intrinsic motivation of the objective and commitment. Intrinsic motivation
is related to both task performance and organizational citizenship behaviour.
Adapting the concept to the tourist sector, it has been mentioned above that according
to Dominguez (2009) in order that companies in the sector could gain a competitive
advantage, they should perform differently compared to their competition, and so that this
happens, there should be an ideal environment in the organization and a management team
that know how to coordinate and direct their workers. At this point we introduce the concept
of transformational leadership as a key concept in high and middle management in the
actions to be performed within the company (Rodriguez and Castillo, 2009).
2. EMPOWERMENT
Another variable to consider is the concept of empowerment that is emerging in
recent years as a concept with major implications for both organizational effectiveness and
occupational health, since it mentions the sense of control and power that individuals have
in a work context.
Although the term organizational empowerment may have been used by some
authors before the decade of the nineties, it was not sooner than that time when it gained
strength, especially with the works of Thomas and Velthouse (1990) about psychological
empowerment, Barley and Kunda (1992) on the theory of satisfaction of people at work or
Perez (1989) on the improvement of the quality of working life.
Analyzing each of the above, Rosenberg (1979) and Perez (1989) considered that the
existence of empowerment in the company must be linked to a good quality working life,
and mentioned some of the factors that influence it such as the increase of the loyalty and
motivation of workers in the tasks they perform. Barley and Kunda (1992) have conducted
several studies which directly connect people´s satisfaction with the tasks they perform at
work, economic performance and customer satisfaction.
In this sense, Spreitzer (1995) changed the existing paradigm of empowerment and
proposed two perspectives: the relational / personal perspective and the psychological one.
The individual perspective considers concepts dealing with the person, with self-
sufficiency, power and the competition perceived by the individual. On the other hand, the
psychological perspective takes into account intrapersonal aspects, however, the
components of interaction with other people in the company and the exhibited behaviour
are also considered as important (Zimmerman, 1995).
Other authors have also dealt with dimensions of psychological empowerment over
the years, such as Thomas and Velthouse, (1990), describing empowerment as the increased
intrinsic motivation during the performance of one´s function based on four concepts: a)
significance of task, defined as the moment when an individual perceives a connection
between their work and their own personal standards; b) competence, which it is the belief
that he / she has in their abilities to develop their activity; c) impact, which is the amount
of influence that a person feels he / she gets from certain work results; and, finally, d) self-
determination, defined as an individual's perception of choice related to the tasks he / she
commits to. Subsequently, other authors have made changes to these dimensions, as Menon
and Borg (1995) who modified three of them: perceived control, perceived competence and
goal internalization. This regrouping is done after researching different studies where it can
be observed that most of the items saturate the dimension of "impact" which, subsequently,
defines this new scale of three and where perceived control is the sum of impact plus
choice.
More current authors like Matthews, Diaz and Cole (2003) have considered the
concept on 3 levels: dynamical structure, control of decisions and information flow, or like
Chritens (2012) who takes into consideration four essential aspects: emotional or
intrapersonal, cognitive, behavioural and interpersonal.
Analyzing the concept of empowerment in the hotel sector, authors like Sasser and
Arbeit (1976) started talking about the concept of empowerment as an ideal environment
for the creation of corporate culture adapted to the needs of the people who form it. In this
regard, several studies conducted by Ulmer (1987) identified that for several years salary
had no longer been the only main variable to motivate workers in hotel chains nationwide.
Currently, the hotel industry has great importance in the Spanish GDP and there is a
strong competition in the market, which is why hotels should obtain a competitive
advantage over their competition, and one of Lescano’s (2011) ideas is precisely the
organizational empowerment meant to create added value to customers with the offered
service.
The hotel industry, specifically high-end hotels, should devote great efforts within
their organizations to the learning of their customers' needs, which is why the investment
in TCT facilitates workers to interact with customers more efficiently. (Law and
Jogaratnam, 2005)
Tn this sense, we reinforce the benefits of having a good capacity for learning at an
organizational level in order to better coordinate goals and to measure the results of our
corporate mission statement through the implementation of the BSC. The Balanced
Scorecard also allows us to unify operational criteria in the case of hotel chains where the
systems established in the BSC have to be replicated.
4. BALANCED SCORECARD
The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic management system developed by Robert S.
Kaplan and David P. Norton (1992) which is based on the mission and vision of the
company. Tt suggests establishing an alignment of employees' goals with those of the
company, based on the development of four perspectives: the learning and growth
perspective and the business process perspective as internal variables, and the customer
and financial perspectives as external variables.
For its successful implementation in the company, we start from the correct
sequential application of the perspectives ranging from internal to external ones.
Learning Business
Customer Financial
and growth process
The BSC implementation requires developing objectives for each of the prospects in
such a way that the strategy of the company is made measurable through monitoring
indicators that measure these objectives.
The objectives of the Learning and Growth Perspective (LGP) lie at the basis of the
other three perspectives so that they function as inducers of the results of these
perspectives. According to Norton and Kaplan the categories of variables that belong to
this approach are: employees´ capabilities, the capacity of the information systems and
empowerment as delegation of power. Performance indicators in LGP seek to strengthen
individual as well as teamwork performance by setting different goals in each case.
Most companies decide to start the implementation of the BSC through their
employees` knowledge and acceptance of the benefits that entails the whole company
working in the same direction, meaning that every member, regardless of their rank, should
be aware of the mission and vision statements and the objectives and perspectives set to
achieve the expected goals (Norreklit and Schoenfel, 1998).
The main idea is to consider the BSC as a management system that connects the
strategy of the organization with the specific tasks of individuals and teams, namely with
measurable Key Perfomance Indicators (KPI) (Voelpel et al. 2006). The way to understand
the whole BSC is based on the strategic map in which all perspectives are related in a cause-
effect chain with their objectives and indicators.
In the hotel sector the BSC is an important tool for the coordination of different
stakeholders that the strategic function of the company aims at, thus giving meaning and
continuity to intangible factors.
5. THEORETICAL APPROACH
Transformational leadership facilitates organizational learning, Senge (1990) and
promotes the creation of organizational knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). A
positive evolution between transformational leadership and learning capacity was obtained
as a result of a survey of 408 Spanish companies in the three sectors, where Podsakoff`s
scale of leadership measurement was used, Podsakoff et al (1996), verifying the goodness
of transformational leadership in the generation of creativity in organizations, a basic factor
in order to achieve high learning capacity. Garcia, Romerosa and Llorens (2005).
Based on the development of these studies we can establish a first hypothesis that
links transformational leadership and learning in organizations.
a) Commitment to learning
b) System perspective
c) Openness and experimentation
d) Transfer of knowledge
Based on the concurrence of common features needed for the development of
organizational learning capacity and the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard we
establish the following hypothesis:
6. CONCLUSIONS
Once the proposed fieldwork is done, we should develop – if the results of the
relations raised in the hypotheses are confirmed – a predictive methodology to assess the
efficiency and effectiveness of the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard based on
learning capacity, which at the same time will be conditioned by empowerment and
transformational leadership.
We could establish some items that assess the previously mentioned constructs,
which would allow to predict the success of the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard.
The implementation of the BSC would also serve to control the initial constructs
before the implantation is carried out, irrespective of the sector we address, but especially
in the hotel sector, where personal relationships with customers have an exceptional impact
on the final result. After that, the obtained feedback on learning capacity with an improved
BSC could be studied.
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