Human Relations in the Hotel Industry

Abstract

Readers will recall the series on "Human Re lations in the Restaurant Industry" which ap peared in recent numbers of this magazine. The article that follows is an excerpt from a new book by the same author, Prof. William Foote Whyte of the N.Y. State School of Industrial & Labor Relations at Cornell University. This book, Ac tion Research for Management, will be published in January 1965 by the Dorsey Press of R. D. Irwin, Inc.

Research for this new volume was conducted by Professor Whyte and his associates in a large hotel during 1947, soon after the publication of the restaurant study. The hotel's employe turn over was well over 20 percent monthly. For this reason, among others, the hotel's executive vice president and general manager invited Professor Whyte (then an associate professor in sociology at the University of Chicago) to set up a project at "Hotel Tremont" to learn what was wrong with his personnel department's hiring practices and with his department heads' supervision.

The researchers soon found that supervisory people, in their dealings with workers, reflected their own uncertainties and insecurities which stemmed from autocratic, uncommunicative top management. These tensions were funneled down through all echelons. Employes on the lower levels reflected their frustrations in dealing with one another, with guests, and with their super visors. They soon left or were fired.

Thus Action Research for Management is a penetrating study of a hotel operation in trouble. The search for solution begins in the snarled human relations at the bottom of the heap, but the path for better adjustment is found to lead to the controls upstairs.

Because the hotel's administrative officers were well known, the publication of this study was delayed until a time when portraits acutely drawn would have become less recognizable. The delay in publication, however, in no way dimin ishes the timeliness nor the value of this study in human dynamics. The excerpts below merely set the stage for the drama which follows in the book.—Editor.