Ethical Principles for the Hospitality Curriculum

Abstract

A survey of 45 GMs of the largest hotels in several U.S. states found a strong perception that hotel-industry workers and managers do not always behave ethically. The GMs' estimates of the annual cost of ethical violations in their own hotels ranged from under $10,000 to over $500,000, with a mean exceeding $100,000. Given a list of 12 ethical principles, the respondents ranked the concepts according to their importance to profitable hotel operation and then again according to how frequently each principle was breached. The four most important ethical principles for successful operation were leadership, accountability, commitment to excellence, and integrity. The three most-often-breached principles (in the managers' view) were accountability, commitment to excellence, and respect for others. Anecdotal comments comprised scathing observations of unethical behavior. Like so many people, the respondents considered themselves more ethical than others in the industry and also believed that the industry itself had a distance to go in relation to other businesses. The results indicated to the authors that college-level instruction in ethics would be useful for hospitality students.