Organizational Culture and Group Dynamics in the tourism industry

Abstract

The tourism industry is one of the most dominant industries at a global level that affect the world’s economy (Belias et al., 2017), as the tourism industry contributes to a very high percentage of the Gross Domestic Product of many countries (such as United States, China, Japan, Italy, France and Spain) (Statista, 2021). On the other hand, researchers have acknowledged the importance of organizational culture (Cook & Yanow, 1993; Schein, 1993) as well as the importance of group dynamics, (Crossan et al., 1999; Wastell, 1999) on the members of an organization. Over the latest decades, globalization has made cultural diversity a world-wide phenomenon. Tourism and Hospitality is a field where someone can recognize the importance of cultural differences among different cultural groups. In an organization, such as a hotel company, there are a lot of cultural diversities not only among the employees of the hotel but also among the guests of the hotel (Rampley, 2005; Bavik, 2015). So it is essential for a hotel company to establish its organizational culture which will be consist of several values, rules and priorities that everyone who is involved in it (employees and guests) has to follow. The aim of this paper is to examine the current literature concerning the relationship between organizational culture and group dynamics in general, as well as in the tourism industry. The methodology which will be used is literature selection of papers, studies, articles and journals retrieved from online bibliographic databases (such as Science Direct and Google Scholar). Although, there is a significant amount of papers discussing the organizational culture or the group dynamics in an organization there seems to be a research lack in the connection between organizational culture and group dynamics especially in the touristic and hospitality services. With the current paper we try to shed some light in the above field in order to trigger for future theoretical as also empirical research.