![]() Owners who contract an HMC for its management know-how expect the company to make and implement better decisions, and to guide the hotel GM, all of which is meant to result in improved operating performance. ![]() We suspect that this is because HMCs are known for their centralized policies and focus on economies of scale, both of which appear to reduce GM independence. Leeway was given to GMs regarding operational, marketing and HR decisions yet, they had little say when it came to financial or strategic issues. We also found that GMs of independent hotels did in fact have more autonomy than their counterparts in HMC hotels. Our findings have led us to wonder if the conventional wisdom about the role of GM may in fact be outdated. This finding intrigued us because strategy's emergence as a GM competency is, according to most previous research, very recent and most GMs have reported little academic training in the area. In other words, if GMs are generally given vast control over operational issues, why did they rank this so low in terms of their autonomy? We were further surprised to find that the GMs we surveyed also reported "strategy" as the second highest area of autonomy. ![]() However, we were surprised to find that hotel operations, although generally considered a core competency for most GMs, was ranked second-to-last on the autonomy scale. Our findings confirmed previous research that finance is the area of least autonomy. The most autonomy was reported in marketing, followed by strategy, human resources, hotel operations and finally finance. We found that there were significant differences in the average level of autonomy across the different areas. Our findings suggest that while GMs report relatively high levels of autonomy in their position, these levels do vary substantially across individuals, and particularly across functional responsibilities, management structure and hotel size, and the degree of human capital. We also examined the impact that hotel size and GM education and experience have on the GM’s independence. Through a survey of 116 hotel general managers working in independent and chain-managed upscale and luxury European hotels, we examined how much autonomy GMs actually have to make operational, financial, strategic, marketing and human resource decisions. ![]() GMs, however, may not always have the autonomy to make these critical decisions as the hotel’s owner and/or hotel management company (HMC) may in fact limit this through their own decision-making interventions. A GM’s ability to make decisions and take action will thus have an important impact on his or her hotel’s operational and strategic results. The hotel General Manager (GM) is the person ultimately responsible for a hotel’s performance. ![]()
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