Human resource management in the Bulgarian hotel in dustry
currently embedded in the uncertainties of the transitional period between a command and market economy. The old ways of doing things are appreciated as being inappropriate, but the old systems and procedures which gave them momentum largely remain in the current transitional situation. The new world of market economy is anticipated (with millenarian zeal by some and considerable ambivalence by others) but the route by which it will be achieved is not clearly envisaged and continuing instabilities and confusion at government level are replicated and magnified at industry and local levels.
The Bulgarian hospitality industry would certainly benefit from the introduction of HRM principles; both 'hard' (as in the U.K. industry) to facilitate more cost-effective deployment of staff and 'soft' to empower those employees who are involved in organiz- ations at a strategic or tactical level to perceive alternatives and take decisions. Paradoxi- cally, the introduction of such approaches is extremely difficult to envisage because of the mobilization of bias (Batstone et al., 1977) perpetuated by centralization and established inflexibilities. Managers in the Bulgarian hospitality industry remain unable to take a different approach to managing and rewarding employees because of the difficulty of challenging the entrenched highly cumbersome custom and practice and the difficulties this would cause in relation to union representation. The increasing strength of trade unions in the changing political and economic situation tends to have had conservative (defensive) rather than radical (innovative) implications. Fairness is seen as more important then justice and there are genuine threats to employee welfare and workers' rights in the emerging trends: the inherent dangers of capitalism, as of communism, are well known. There is no objective basis for salary review or review of substantive and procedural employment practices in general, nor a tradition which would allow for such reviews to be undertaken. Perhaps an additional latent effect of the system is that status differences become more important in a situation where the differences in reward are insubstantial, which paradoxically reinforces hierarchy and job demarcations. Privatiza- tion will provide an opportunity for radical change, but cultural inertia may prevent those with the potential to do so from facilitating significantly different approaches to managing employees.
Leontiades (1982:58-69) contended that 'managers make strategy and strategy deter- mines business success or failure', but in the Bulgarian situation, until now, the managers of State-owned hotels surveyed in this project have manifestly not made strategy. To talk about Human Resource Management in Bulgarian hotels is to impose a paradigm which makes little sense in the Bulgarian context. Human resource management implies freedom, on the part of managements, either centrally within organizations or locally at establishment level, to take decisions about how to manage labour. Neither the Bulgarian industry directors (who have been accustomed to taking strategic decisions within the constraints of the command economy) nor hotel managers (who have not) have had much scope to manage strategically or to regard employees as assets and resources rather than costs, quite apart from ideological obstacles to such approaches. Hotel managers in the projected privatized tourism industry will have power and responsibilities that they have not had before, but they will require not simply training in managing employee relations, resourcing, rewarding and developing staff, but also, simply, in taking a pro-active view of their own role as managers, and their own power to influence and determine the future direction which the organization can take. They will require to be trained to perceive and to make choices, and take responsibility for doing so.