The Chain Hotel Chef’s Pygmalion Leadership for Effective Teamwork of Cooks

Abstract

Purpose – In the past, the chain hotel chefs only serve food to their customers. However recently, the hotel chefs play a pivotal role in hotel including considering various customer preferences, safety and nutrition of food, and increasing profits through effective human resource management and inventory control. With the change of the chain hotel chef’s’ roles, pygmalion leadership, one of new leadership styles, focuses on the effect that leader’s positive expectation let subordinates have motivation and more engage in work. This study investigates the effect of chain hotel chef’s pygmalion leadership on leader trust and organizational trust. Research design, data, and methodology - This study was to investigate the structural relationships among chain hotel restaurant chefs' pygmalion leadership, hotel restaurant cooks' leader trust, organizational trust, and teamwork, and how leader trust and organizational trust play mediating roles in the relationship between pygmalion leadership and teamwork. In this model, pygmalion leadership includes 4 dimensions: Climate, Feedback, Input, and Output. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaire survey on cooks of Deluxe hotel restaurants located in Seoul and Gyonggi-Do. The samples for data analyses were 243 excepting unusable responses. Result – The findings can be summarized as follows: First, climate and feedback had a positive effect on leader trust, respectively. Second, feedback and output had a statistically positive effect on organizational trust, respectively. Third, leader trust had positive effects on organizational trust and teamwork. Fourth, organizational trust had a significant effect on teamwork. Conclusions – As a chain hotel chef treats his/her staffs sincerely, they will be more engaged in work by establishing trust in their leader. Ultimately, it leads to higher sales profit and customer satisfaction. In addition, a hotel can encourage chefs and other staffs to treat each other as if the student-instructor relations, not just commanding staffs. Then, cooks build up their trust to their leader and organization for its sustained growth and development, and the internal bond in organization including teamwork is strengthened. Therefore, to strengthen teamwork and organizational trust, there should be active communication, knowledge sharing, goal sharing, and cooperation between chefs and cooks.