Abstract
Hospitality is more than a professional field: it has been called a virtue in itself by many. It can be seen as a whole aggregate of virtues with a very intense social dimension: working with and for others, taking care of their most basic needs so that they in turn can give the best of themselves. Given this, good hospitality requires skills and virtues in two definable areas: the sphere of work, and the sphere of interpersonal relationships. This chapter gives an overview of main skill areas and their related virtues to guide the hospitality professional in working well. Five skill groups crucial to working well are identified and discussed in this chapter. For each group, a number of related virtues are detailed. The good exercise of each set of skills and virtues achieved in hospitality work, as well as key characteristics, are elaborated on. Moreover, concrete suggestions for developing these skills and virtues are made.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Human capital pertains more to an individual’s skill set, while social capital is that individual’s relation to a particular group: “Human capital is transferable when an individual moves from one team to another; but social capital has limited transferability, and must mostly be acquired after joining a team” (Engelland, 2018, p. 175).
- 3.
Concretely, the WEF’s Reskilling Revolution taxonomy seems to use “skills” to refer to hard skills, and “attitudes” to refer to soft skills. Contrast this to EHL Insights, which adapts the distinction between hard and soft skills, and the McKinsey Global Institute classification (also featured on WEF’s website), which does not use the distinction but considers empathy, active listening, and self-management “foundational skills.” See links in Selected References.
- 4.
For a more developed discussion of these points, see Chapter 7.
- 5.
Note that while we cite both Annas and Stichter, the authors actually have opposing views of virtue-as-skill.
- 6.
In the DELTA classification, there is one exception: integrity.
- 7.
The virtues mentioned in this chapter have been drawn from authoritative classical sources: the Secunda Secundae of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The reader is encouraged to look up contemporary virtue ethics literature, as many authors and philosophers have “updated” these virtues to fit twenty first century contexts.
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Osondu, A., Garcia, P.K. (2022). Hospitality and Personality Development: Technical and Human Excellence. In: Ogunyemi, K., Ogunyemi, O., Okoye, E. (eds) Humanistic Perspectives in Hospitality and Tourism, Volume 1. Humanism in Business Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95671-4_11
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