CASE STUDY : IMPRESS HOTEL Sabrina Rullian has just taken over as personnel director at the IMPRESS Hotel Group, a major international five star hotel business that has hotels in the UK, Europe and South East Asia, and the UAE. The headquarters are in North London, Middlesex. Sabrina’s task in previous hotels in which she has worked involved setting up systems and standard operating procedures and then producing a quality manual so all employees knew” what to do, how to do it and when to do it”. As part of her approach she would update the standard operating procedure on an annual basis. She was also involved in working directly with the Customer Service Training Department to provide coached scripts, encourage teamwork and allocate roles and responsibilities amongst staff. Sabrina, had personally trained senior hotel managers in leadership and motivation. The IMPRESS Hotel Group, (IHG) she realised was going to be very different. SOME BACKGROUND HISTORY: The IHG Chairperson/CEO was Andrea Diviner, an evangelical American who has just stepped down. Her Vision was “to create the most perfect hotel chain in the world”. She felt that the standardised operating procedure approach which is currently NOT being used utilised was not appropriate for the customers of an international five star hotel. She wanted customers to have a ‘taste’ of local culture and food and not a McDonalds type experience. Unfortunately following the COVID pandemic there has been a global economic downturn, dramatic developments in artificial intelligence (which has resulted in a decrease in Executive business travel) the hotel has for the past 2 years been making a loss – in fact the hotel has experienced increases in operating costs and decreases in operating income. The hotel’s organisational culture has been incredibly slow to adapt to changes in the macro economic environment. This and the loss of profit and impact on share value has led to the shareholders sacking Andrea and bringing in a former CEO of a totally different organisation, a manufacturing plant. Employees are apparently very worried about the ‘reported’ future changes and some have already begun to be absent through illness. Sabrina like most of the hotel’s management, had come from other mainstream chains, which were extremely different. Sabrina’s former HRM department’s role was to create instruction manuals spelling out exactly what should be done by whom and how. The role of the operations managers was to implement these procedures and if they were not sure of anything they always knew they could find the answer in one of the manuals that covered one wall in their office and which they had access to via the organisation’s intranet. Sabrina’s predecessor who had worked in the hotel for the past 5 years and provided the hotel with luxurious furnishings, local produce and surroundings was also sacked. The new CEO, was very clear on attaining their Vision for the hotel. Their vision is to make the necessary changes to enable the Impress Hotel to compete with locally run hotels that offered a high quality service at a reasonable cost. The type of customer the CEO had in mind are tourists who typically stay at the hotels for around 10 days and Executives (typical stay 2 days) that no longer had a vast company budget from which to spend on accommodation. The CEO knows that many organisational changes would have to take place to fulfil their Vision for the hotel. However, they are determined to bring about his Vision and believed that Sabrina was instrumental in the change process necessary for its fulfilment. All the staff are paid slightly above the industry average and IMPRESS Hotels are seen as THE place to work. However, the hotels are not necessarily seen as THE place to stay by customers. Customer feedback to date has been very poor. This includes very importantly poor and inefficient services and specifically a service that is not timely nor responsive to customer needs, (apparently hindered by inefficient processes and ineffective use of capacity). In summary, the CEO said: “We need to put my Vision into practice – and this is going to need considerable organisational change”. Sabrina has been tasked with providing the CEO an organisational change report. See above for assessment brief . 1)Potential Impact of the Proposed Change Individual Unit of Analysis – How may individuals respond to the proposed change – Bridges (1991), Kubler-Ross (1969). Implications? Group Unit of Analysis – When presented with a new task what are the various phases that teams may go through? How might this impact productivity? Group Norms? 2)Potential Impact of the Proposed Change Organisational Unit of Analysis – Culture…. What is it? How does it potential impact effective/successful change? Strategy, processes and so forth 3)Potential Implications of the Proposed Change Resistance – how might individuals/groups respond ? Might individuals use politics to get their own way?