Liderazgo y roles de equipo: análisis de un restaurante gastronómico

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the study of leadership in organizations has taken a lot of force due to its influence on the management of work teams. The most prominent theory, Bass's Theory of Leadership (1985), describes two leadership styles: the transactional and transformational styles. Transactional leadership is characterized by the exchange of rewards that occurs between the leader and his followers. However, transformational leadership contributes to the performance of their followers, as well as to their motivation (Molero, Saboya and Guirado, 2010). Another aspect that has been related to the management of work teams is the distribution of roles in these. The theory of team roles of Belbin (1981) defines the nine roles that must appear in the configuration of a team so that it has a balanced distribution, thus achieving the most optimal performance. Many studies (Cruz-Ortiz, Salanova and Martinez, 2013) also highlight the relationship of leadership with other organizational phenomena such as: job satisfaction or motivation. However, from the academic discipline, there are still contexts that are given little visibility, as is the case of the restoration sector. That is why we wanted to focus the study in this context, this being its distinctive feature. The restoration is a sector that is characterized by having an obvious problem in reconciling professional and personal life and working conditions, often precarious. It is a sector that stands out for having the highest levels of turnover and its dynamism can generate stress states in workers, causing imbalances in the work climate, motivation and performance of workers (Ocampo, Juarez, Arias and Hindrichs, 2015 ). The constant changes in this sector show the need to manage the equipment correctly. For this reason, this research has been approached from the perspective of leadership, its main objective being to study how teams are managed in haute cuisine through the analysis of leadership style, and to know the distribution of team roles in a restaurant with Michelin stars. The analytical approach to research has been qualitative and quantitative. The sample has been selected for convenience, counting with a team of 24 people between kitchen and room staff. The techniques that have been used for the collection of information are: the MLQ-5X questionnaire to evaluate the leadership, and the self-perception inventory to develop the distribution of Belbin roles. On the other hand, through the interview, we have deepened more about the context in which the organization is located. The results obtained show that there is no leadership style that stands out from others, which makes us think that there is no defined strategy of how to manage the team. As for the distribution of team roles, the nine roles that Belbin determines appear, but even so there is some role overload and ambiguity, which generates an imbalance. Based on the information obtained through the interview, the problem of the sector in terms of working conditions becomes evident, since it is not possible to reconcile work and personal life, causing a lack of motivation in the employees. Also, high levels of staff turnover hurt the team because a cycle of learning and continuous adaptation is created. This allows us to affirm that an approach is necessary from the discipline of human resources, which should actively intervene in the creation and execution of a strategic plan that allows to control these phenomena and in this way, watch over the workers. Thus, future lines of research are drawn that can be a starting point for improvements in catering organizations.