Developing a new hospitality industry organizational culture scale

Abstract

Defining and measuring organizational culture is important, because a strong organizational culture could potentially yield sustainable competitive advantages to organizations. However, creating a strong organizational culture is often challenging due to the ambiguity surrounding this concept. A review of the organizational culture literature resulted in a wide range of definitions and measurements of organizational culture across disciplines and industries. This study argues that the diversity in scales that have been previously developed for assessing organizational culture may not be fully applicable or appropriate for use within the hospitality context. Therefore, by highlighting the key factors affecting the business environment and the unique characteristics of the hospitality industry, the purpose of this study is to identify the scope of organizational culture, specifically within the hospitality industry, as well as to introduce a tailored organizational culture scale, which is aligned with the hospitality context. Therefore, one of the purposes of this study is to identify hospitality industry organizational culture constructs. Another purpose of this study is to investigate whether the identified constructs unique and distinguishable from that of other industries. To fill these gaps, this current study employed a multidisciplinary and mixed-method research approach in order to develop a new hospitality industry organizational scale (HIOCS) particularly for the hospitality industry. The findings suggest that the hospitality industry has unique cultural characteristics that are distinguished from similar industries. The findings also suggest that cohesiveness is the most important cultural element of the hospitality industry. This study also makes recommendations with regards to how this newly developed scale can be used by the hospitality industry as a means to assess and strengthen organizational culture within organizations in this industry.