HANOI UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF MANAGEMENT AND TOURISM

Capstone Project
Spring 2022

Leadership and Human Resource policies

within the tour guide team of Crossing
Vietnam

Instructor: Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Hieu

Major: Business Administration

Group: 14

Group members: Duong Duy Phan Student ID: 1904000092

Pham Ngoc Linh Student ID: 1904000067

Nguyen Ngoc Thang Student ID: 1904000106

Nguyen Thi Thuy Dung Student ID: 1904000026

Bui Cam Nhung Student ID: 1904040093

1
 Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................... 3
I. Problem statement ................................................................................. 4
1. Description of the target community ................................................... 4
2. Problem statement ............................................................................... 5
3. Impacts................................................................................................. 6
II. Literature review .................................................................................. 7
1, Leadership ........................................................................................... 7
2, Training and Appraisal system ............................................................ 9
III. Method ............................................................................................... 11
1. Identify the sample population .......................................................... 11
2. Interview ............................................................................................ 12
3. Design questionnaire ......................................................................... 12
4. Analyze the results ............................................................................ 13
5. Publish the results .............................................................................. 13
IV. Work allocation ................................................................................. 13
V. Potential obstacles and the feasibility ............................................... 16
References................................................................................................. 18

2
 ABSTRACT

In today's business environment, especially for small and medium private companies,

leadership and Human Resource Management issues are prominent and difficult to resolve as

such small businesses lack expertise and professional personnel in the aforementioned fields.

Our targeted subject of research, Crossing Vietnam remains no exception as it has stayed one

of the small local businesses in a constantly growing industry sector as tourism in Vietnam.

Thus, our research shall contain quantitative and qualitative factual reports, and in-depth

analysis backed by a theoretical basis, followed by potential recommendations and solutions.

All following management-related issues in this text are incurred as the result of observing

and conducting rational analysis based on personal experiences as well as the detailed

attached surveys aimed to craft the most accurate and comprehensive picture of the

company’s position and issue. This text is presented as rhetoric research with the goal of

acting as a form of consulting material for Crossing Vietnam to utilize as they continue

operating their business, while also remains as an effective way for our group to practice our

skills sets of academic analytics, management consulting, and overall gain practical

knowledge in such fields.

3
I. Problem statement

1. Description of the target community

Crossing Vietnam was established as a limited liability firm, and has been practicing a wide

span of control. The company has three levels which are the CEO, the back office, and the

tour guides as collaborators. The CEO named N, who founded the company, is the direct

manager of the back office. The back office team has five members, and one of these

members is leading the tour guide team.

In this report, we analyzed three target groups: the CEO, the back office, and the tour guide

team.

4
2. Problem statement

During December 2022 and January 2023, the company's internal report revealed that the

turnover rate increased sharply due to the change in tour guide leader, resulting in problems

rooted in the back office’s leadership and the company’s policies. The common pattern of

those issues demonstrated the firm’s major problem, which is poor employee-oriented

practice.

Before the new leader of the tour guide team was promoted, the previous tour guide leader

was Z. He intensely recruited good sources of tour guides with good personal skills, English

proficiency, and charisma. The performance was excellent until the new leader, Q, was

promoted, which led to an increasing number of bad reviews due to his lack of a good

recruiting source. Q’s guides hired do not have good English proficiency, poor personal skills,

and lack initiative. Crossing's ranking on online platforms such as Klook and GetYourGuide

decreased in January 2023 due to bad reviews and poor performance of the new tour guides.

Company tour guides must accompany an itinerary that has been sent to the travelers in

advance, and the tour budget is provided for the tour guides to buy entrance tickets, food, and

drinks for customers. However, after the new leader is promoted, the budget was decreased

from 150,000 VND to 120,000 VND/customer in order to save the company cost, which

cannot meet the itinerary demand due to the higher cost of tourist destinations’ entrance

tickets. The tour guides showed their disagreement in a meeting and provided some

contributive comments, and the budget has been remaining unchanged. A low budget per

customer has led to some issues such as the lack of flexibility, budget shortage to recover the

entrance tickets, and bad reviews coming from travelers.

5
Most of the tour guides in Crossing Vietnam have the strengths of speaking fluent English,

dense knowledge, and personal experiences of being Hanoi locals, which could have been a

severe competitive advantage with the other agencies. However, the new tour guide leader

does not put a strong emphasis on tour guides’ recognition, which is shown by a new non-

sense ranking system resulting in the number of tours that they can guide, the number of good

reviews, and the personal relationship with the back office when the tour guides’ potentials

have more things to do with their knowledge, flexibility, carefulness, and personal charisma

towards the travelers. For example, if the guide named X can guide more tours than others

and have some good reviews but X still has many drawbacks in knowledge and personal skill,

then X will be ranked higher than Y, who cannot guide many tours but has excellent personal

skill, charisma, and knowledge. A lower rank increases the likelihood of a guide being fired.

A real case happened when a number of experienced tour guides were fired without notice

because they cannot guide on some specific weeks, despite the fact that the tour guides are

only collaborators and not full-time/part-time employees, and the guides with many

drawbacks and inexperience were retained thanks to their personal relationship with the back

office and their high review ranking. The company is said by the tour guides to put overload

pressure on sales and reviews, not caring about personal potential, and not necessarily setting

up a ranking system. This could be further proved as a not crucial performance appraisal by

mentioning the previous time when the old tour guide’s leader has not come up with any

ranking board, and the good review rate is beyond expectations when August and September

2022 did not record any bad reviews.

3. Impacts

Those practices have resulted in a higher turnover rate when the tour guides are finding new

agencies to work for due to their dissatisfaction and low engagement/motivation towards the

6
new policy and the company’s disagreeableness with the tour guides’ opinions. Besides, the

number of good reviews decreased in Klook, GetYourGuide, and TripAdvisors, leading to a

lower rank with other competitors.

II. Literature review

1, Leadership

For the longest time, leadership has been perceived as one of the pivoting adhesive factors

that bridge the gap between employees and employers. Despite the long range of complexity,

the definition of leadership can be simply boiled down to “a process whereby an individual

influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (Northouse 2018), which in our

research context can be referred to organizational objectives that are gained through changes.

As for our chosen company, the leadership related issues can be traced back to a recent but

sudden replacement of a leader which provoked a shift in leadership style that personnel may

find it hard to adapt to. While the previous leader focused on strictly hiring and training their

personnel, the current leader has been exuding a certain negligence toward the quality of the

staff they hired. Evidence for such claims can be demonstrated by the overly passive,

ignorance intake of newly-hired that resulted in a recent downfall of reviews and feedback.

Furthermore, as one of the many changes that the new leader made to accommodate their

leadership style, they created a result oriented ranking system in which tour guides who were

able to be eulogized with high rating and feedback shall be highly ranked. Such a method

bypassed a tour guide's necessary skills including but unlimited to communication skills,

flexibility, human skills, charisma, and most important of it all, knowledge. This system left

various collaborators on the verge of being laid off as they experienced time constraints filling

enough shifts, even though they are one of the most experienced staffs that the company has

ever employed.

7
For such aspects as leadership in an organizational environment, the designated methodology

of analysis of our group includes the Work engagement analysis, the Hersey and Blanchard's

Situational Leadership Model, and the Equity theory.

Work engagement refers to a positive, affective-motivational state of high energy combined

with high levels of dedication and a strong focus on work (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2010). It is

highly desirable for public and private organizations to have engaged employees because

engagement has been shown to coincide with high levels of creativity, task performance,

organizational citizenship behavior, and client satisfaction (Bakker et al., 2014). Work

engagement is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (Schaufeli et al., 2002, p.

74). According to Blake, Mouton, & McCanse Leadership Grid, the leadership style of the

company is high on Concern for production and low on Concern for people. This means that

the company is result oriented, which significantly affects employees’ work engagement.

The ability and willingness of specific employees are the emphases of the Hersey-Blanchard

Model, a leadership framework. The Situational Leadership Model is another name for the

paradigm, which was created by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard. Unlike other leadership

models, the Situational Leadership Model proposes a leadership style that can adapt to

different situations in the workplace. The model uses Directive behavior and Supportive

behavior as the main measurements. Furthermore, each leadership style is categorized based

on employees’ abilities and willingness. Combining with Work engagement, we can find the

most suitable leadership style instead of only result oriented.

8
First developed in the early 1960s by behavioral psychologist John S. Adams, equity theory is

concerned with defining and measuring the relational satisfaction of employees. Basically, the

theory insists that to keep employees engaged and satisfied, the company needs to treat them

fairly and give them appropriate rewards for their skills and experiences. If employees feel

they are treated unequally like others, this may lead to a lack of motivation, lower work

engagement, and affect work performance. As mentioned in the problem statement, the

appraisal system is a problem that needs to be redesigned.

2, Training and Appraisal system

As of every functioning business on the market, the surface value creating source which in the

context of this company is the tour guides have to be equipped with the most updated

9
knowledge and professional experience. Nonetheless, when the top manager of the company

cut the budget per customer from 150,000 VND to 120,000 VND, guides are not facilitated

with a more suitable traveling framework, leading to itinerary related complaints and under

budgeted cases that have to be compensated by the guides’ personal capital. All of which have

been reported and solution suggestions have been made by the staff without receiving any

compliance or explanation from the top manager, signaling autocracy and poor people-

oriented practice. Accompanied with the pressure from the unsuitable ranking system various

seasoned staff have either quit the job or get fired unreasonably, leaving the company with

inexperienced new-hired. To battle our approaches to such a sector of problems, the human

resource architecture model poses a worthy method of analysis and drawing

recommendations from.

10
The Human Resource Architecture Model contains a ranking of the importance of different

types of employees by utilizing two axes of Uniqueness of human capital and Value of human

capital from which the conclusions on the availability of such human resource and how they

should be treated by the company could be derived. This model poses a great contender to be

implemented as the company would recognise the need to perform a formative reshaping of

its human resource and battle the training/appraisal process.

III. Method

Working without a people-oriented approach is seen to present challenges for the business in

terms of rewarding staff and their performance, as well as indirectly harming overall sales and

brand recognition. The purpose of this project is to evaluate Business A's poor performance

and unfavorable reviews in order to create a practical solution to the issue they are currently

facing. All employees & collaborators of Company A are included in the project's

participants.

The primary and secondary methodology that is done throughout the process seeks to give a

thorough overview of each step. The suggested research in primary method has 5 stages:

Identify the sample population, interview, design questionnaires, analyze the data, and publish

the results.

1. Identify the sample population

In the beginning, we looked for the general purpose of the solution and whether company A

choses this method for performance evaluation or not along with the reasons and goals. By

asking current partners and workers about the issues they are encountering, how they have

11
carried out duties, and how they are recognized for that achievement, we are able to examine

firm A's culture and clarify the current situation.

2. Interview

Following the selection of the sample population, certain members of the sampling group are

chosen at random for interviews. This method permits the interviewers to be flexible with the

way interview questions are phrased while ensuring that all the information received from the

interviewees falls under the same general categories. Collaborators on the tour are the first

demographic group from which we would want to hear feedback. Current employees of the

company make up the second sample population group from which we would like to gather

feedback. This seeks to present perspectives from both sides. Since it was a small company,

our group had opportunities to interview the CEO about the topics they wanted to be assessed

and created. We choose to use the Zoom app for the presentation interview with questions

related to the company’s problem. As planned, the interview will take place in about 20

minutes. We also study the findings of the first survey to try to establish what components

should be included in the solution. The final decision was to focus on actual employee

behavior in the workplace rather than on general characteristics.

3. Design questionnaire

The survey will be conducted by collecting data from 20 to 30 people in the company. The

survey will be built based on the combination of different academic theories like employee

engagement and employee competency. After the survey, we will build up an overall view of

the company situation.

12
4. Analyze the results

We intend to gain a more comprehensive grasp of the business environment from the inside

out by utilizing a mixed data collection strategy.

5. Publish the results

Getting feedback directly from employees in Company A is quite helpful because it can help

to ensure that the strategy won't falter and aggravate the public. After completing all of the

aforementioned processes, a report detailing the study process and its findings will be written

and released.

Last but not least, we also collect secondary data from trusted sources like books, research, or

models from other companies. In this research, we will mostly apply theories from the book

Leadership in Organization.

IV. Work allocation

Person in
Phase Start date End date Work
charge

23/2/2023 24/2/2023 Choose area topic All members

24/2/2023 24/2/2023 Choose topic All members

PHASE 1 Choose target company and list several

24/2/2023 24/2/2023 All members
problems/issues to research

Contact target company and ask for

25/2/2023 26/2/2023 Linh
permission to work on Capstone project

13
 Create project timeline and work
27/3/2023 2/3/2023 Phan
allocation

2/3/2023 2/3/2023 Outline the problem Linh

3/3/2023 3/3/2023 Literature review Phan, Thắng

Determine data needed and method of

3/3/2023 3/3/2023 inquiry Nhung

Determine potential obstacles and the

3/3/2023 3/3/2023 feasibility of the proposed capstone. Dung

4/3/2023 4/3/2023 Write proposal All members

4/3/2023 4/3/2023 Write abstract Thắng

Proofread, correct and reformat the

5/3/2023 5/3/2023 All members
proposal

6/3/2023 6/3/2023 Submit the proposal Phan

PHASE 2 Build questionnaire for survey and

7/3/2023 7/3/2023 All members
interview

8/3/2023 12/3/2023 Survey company’s staff Linh

14
12/3/2023 13/3/2023 Collect and review data All members

Propose solutions to solve the

Linh, Phan,
14/3/2023 20/3/2023 company's problem & define additional
Thắng
information needed for the project

Meeting to review the solutions and

22/3/2023 25/3/2023 All members
literature study

Submit solutions & literature review for

26/3/2023 27/3/2023 All members
advisor and meeting for feedbacks

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Begin to write Rationale report All members

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Problem statement Linh

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Literature review Phan, Thắng

Nhung,
29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Method of inquiry
Dung

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Results of the project All members

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Conclusion and action plan All members

29/3/2023 1/4/2023 Deliverables Dung

2/4/2023 2/4/2023 Writing abstract Thắng

6/4/2023 6/4/2023 Submit to advisor for feedback Phan

8/4/2023 8/4/2023 Meeting with advisor for feedback All members

15
 Modify the Rationale report and
9/4/2023 15/4/2023 All members
Deliverable

Send the report and deliverable to the

15/4/2023 15/4/2023 Linh
company

20/4/2023 20/4/2023 Receive company’s comments Linh

Modify the report and deliverable based

23/4/2023 5/5/2023 All members
on company’s comments

7/5/2023 10/5/2023 Proofread and correct All members

11/5/2023 13/5/2023 Review and format all papers All members

Submit Final Deliverable and

15/5/2023 15/5/2023 Phan
Rationale Report

V. Potential obstacles and the feasibility

To start implementing any project, research, feasibility assessment and potential barriers are

very important. This is the first step to help researchers consider the possibility of success and

also the obstacles that need to be overcome to start implementing the project.

In terms of feasibility, there is 1 member in the group who directly attaches and works at

Crossing Vietnam.

With the upper hand advantage of having worked at various departments and teams, more

than anyone, our group possesses such a member that has a grasp on the ongoing operational

situation of the company. From there, it is also easier and more convenient to access different

16
parts of the company to implement the project. Research subjects include managers, office

workers and collaborators who are students studying at universities with language proficiency

and even former employees and collaborators. Fortunately, team members have a good

relationship with the manager, the old leader, the new leader, and also the collaborators. This

assistance is of considerable importance as it allows our team to gain insight, convenience in

survey, assessment, and overall outlook based on complete data collected from many various

aspects, besides the accuracy and reliability of information provided from specific, direct and

up-to-date sources. In addition, the theme of the project related to human resources,

leadership and customer experience is very suitable for a travel company and a highly

competitive market like Crossing Vietnam.

However, in addition to the favorable advantages for project implementation, there are bound

to be potential obstacles that need to be addressed to ensure successful project implementation

and on schedule. Although there is a team member directly working in the company, it is not

easy to raise the problems and shortcomings of the organization for sharing and analysis.

Especially from the management perspective when exploiting and accessing information from

the management level. Therefore, whether the company is open, comfortable and honestly

provides information will also be an issue to consider when implementing the project. But

with the ultimate goal of helping the organization solve problems, enhance the customer

experience, and improve the system for identifying and evaluating employee performance, the

team believes that the company will understand. and support in the research process so that

both of them can achieve common goals and interests. Another problem about the

collaborator evaluation mechanism according to the rate of good reviews received and the

number of tours leading per month leads to the situation of disturbing guests thanks to good

reviews by tourists. Sometimes tourists give good reviews just because they are polite, not

17
based on actual feelings and experiences. Thus, the review results do not accurately reflect

reality, do not grasp the shortcomings to overcome.

In short, when undertaking any project, potential obstacles are inevitable. But given the

possibilities and good goals, the potential obstacles are insignificant. We believe that with

determination, enthusiasm, research and clear planning, our project will be well received and

successful.

References
Schaufeli, W.B., Salanova, M., Gonzalez-Roma, V. and Bakker, A.B. (2002), “The

measurement of engagement and burnout: a two-sample confirmatory factor analytic

approach”, Journal of Happiness Studies, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 71-92.

Breevaart, K., Bakker, A.B., Hetland, J., Demerouti, E., Olsen, O.K. and Espevik, R. (2014),

“Daily transactional and transformational leadership and daily employee engagement”,

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 87 No. 1, pp. 138-157.

Schaufeli, W.B. and Bakker, A.B. (2010), “Defining and measuring work engagement:

bringing clarity to the concept”, in Bakker, A.B. and Leiter, M.P. (Eds), Work Engagement: A

Handbook of Essential Theory and Research, Psychology Press, New York, NY, pp. 10-24.

Northouse, P. G. (2018). Introduction to leadership: Concepts and practice. SAGE.

18