The Roaring Dragon Hotel Case

THE ROARING DRAGON HOTEL CASE:

The Roaring Dragon Hotel is a case study that describes the takeover of a formerly Chinese management hotel by a western international hotel management company. More precisely it talks about the cultural conflict that occurred for Chinese employees trying to adapt from the former Chinese method(guanxi)to that of the more market oriented, HI management.

In April 2002, the transition from the Chinese managed SOE to management by the HI have been the beginning of the troubles; because Fortune were blind by his goal, his objectives was first to increase the quality of customer service provided by dynamic motivated employees and reduce the annual loss of the company. He took massive changes in the hotel without taking into account the hotel organizational culture including: the employee’s spare time, extra business activities, staff camaraderie’s, warmful meal break…

From one day to the next, the Roaring dragon employees faced new changes wich they hadn’t been prepared to. Consequently they lost their bearings, motivations and developed a feeling of insecurity and exclusion from the top management decisions. The management of the HI team could have been more culturally sensitive in many aspects: First of all, before starting any change, they could have try to understand Chinese culture and the differences in business culture between western and Chinese and the strategy implications. They could have found a bilingual trustworthy Chinese manager to communicate with local employees in order to facilitate the intercultural dialogue and reduce fears among employees. Whereas being relegated to the sideline Tian Wen or the Co-owner Ehri T could have been good “bridges” for both parts because they understood the problems and could have had their words over the selection process. Since guanxi is the base of the RDH management, HI should have study it and see how he could exploit it in an ethical manner.

The HI strategy to achieve its...