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Essay on The Portman Hotel Case Study

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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. First we …show more content…

In this specific case, the guests are the external environmental forces that are causing the behavior. If Scott had realized that his employees were just doing their job, then his opinion of them would be a lot different and would begin to realize that he might need to change something about the companies’ day-to-day processes. Next we will discuss the Expectancy Theory (ET) and how it relates to this case. Again, first we must define what exactly ET is before we can know how it relates to this case. ET proposes that a person will decide to behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over other behaviors due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be. Now that we have defined what ET is we can relate it to the case. Due to the social and environmental forces pushing down on certain PVs, they tend to engage in “shirking”. An example of this act is when a few PVs began to be lazy and not do their fair share of the work, other PVs had to begin picking up the slack of their colleagues. After a while of doing this, they began to wonder why they were working twice as hard and getting paid the exact same. The PVs that were picking up the slack for the others then became less motivated to perform which lead to all of the valets lost their sense of responsibility. So to go back to the original definition, the PVs that were originally working harder than the others began to work less hard

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