The Portman Hotel Company was a relatively small hotel with only 348 rooms and 21 floors located in San Francisco’s booming hotel district. It was influenced with Asian philosophy of services, to provide high quality hospitality to its guest at affordable rates. On paper, the hotel sounded like a great success, one that would definitely flourish amongst the competition. However, even with this philosophy, there were numerous problems that plagued the Portman Hotel. A few examples of these problems are the common mistake of fundamental attribution error (FAE), expectancy theory, as well as operant conditional theory. This essay will explain how these three things can potentially bring down an entire company very quickly.
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Operant conditional theory is defined as, getting people to do things because they want to by applying positive and negative reinforcements to move them in a particular way. The supervisors of the Portman Hotel were adamant about avoiding formal disciplinary actions towards their employees. The supervisors believed that discipline was actually going against what the hotel’s philosophy was. Therefore, instead they used positive reinforcement under the operant conditioning theory as a means to motivate the poor performers. Spencer Scott tried to persuade the poor performers to believe that good performance had many rewards, such as good tips. He felt that with showing the valets the benefits of working hard for the guests, that those same guests would in return graciously reward them.
Now that we have analyzed and pointed out the flaws of the Portman Hotel, we can begin to describe some simple solutions to these problems. First, with the FAE, the problem is with management. If Spencer Scott attempted to figure out why his PVs were running around everywhere he might figure out the source of the problem, instead of jumping to conclusions as he did. He might explore other options such as; hiring additional PVs so that the current ones aren’t always so busy, or attempt to figure out a different strategy in assisting the guests with their high demands.
Secondly, we must