A case study in hotel organizational alignment

In today's competitive marketplace service excellence may be the only competitive differentiation between businesses, especially those that are in the service industry. Senior executives often talk about their wonderful ‘Mission Statements’ that extol the virtues of providing world class service to their customers only to discredit those statements with their daily practices, policies and systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the efficacy of a new survey instrument to identify the factors that need to be aligned with the service mission and the benefits of having those identified factors aligned with the mission/vision statement. The research literature has made it increasingly clear that successful organizations have found ways to ensure that their organizational missions are aligned both in terms of their fit with the external environment and in terms of their fit with all the factors internal to the organization. This paper describes an exploratory investigation of the use of a new alignment measure that can assess the extent to which an organization's internal factors are in alignment with its service mission. The results of a survey of 100 hotel managers indicate that this instrument holds great promise for measuring alignment and that the concept of alignment as measured is significantly related to desired outcomes.