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Purpose: This chapter aims to critically explore the nature of mentoring initiatives through the conceptual lenses of social capital and communities of practice offering a distinctive understanding of talent management (TM) innovations in the international hospitality industry.

Methodology/approach: It achieves its aim through identifying and analysing current mentoring initiatives operating in the international hospitality sector, and scrutinises how they provide a sector level approach to TM challenges.

Findings: Industry level mentoring initiatives emerge as TM innovations connecting employees within networks across the international hospitality sectors. Mentoring creates bonds and bridges between senior and junior employees beyond their own workplaces, connecting them to the industry and supporting TM by enhancing the identification of opportunities and the recognition of talent. These initiatives also act as learning communities where contemporary TM dilemmas can be explored by participants from diverse backgrounds and between generations.

Research limitations/implications: The findings rely on the identification and exploration of publically available data, and therefore future primary data collection would yield richer insights into the experiences of stakeholders of these mentoring initiatives as TM innovations.

Social implications: Mentoring initiatives can exemplify innovative ways of supporting TM and addressing diversity and inequality issues in fragmented and dispersed sectors, such as the international hospitality industry.

Originality/value of paper: The exploration of contemporary mentoring initiatives in the international hospitality industry identifies the value of cross-industry TM innovations stretching beyond stakeholders, such as educators, employers and policy-makers. It identifies mentoring initiatives as mechanisms for creating bonds and bridges between those industry aspirants at various career stages where diversity and inclusion may be a challenge in a fragmented and dispersed sector.

Relates the type of expansion strategies used by international hotel groups to approaches to ensuring organizational cohesion within these organizational settings. Achieves this by exploring dimensions of control and co‐ordination of managerial resources. Uses a case‐study approach which concentrates on the human resource management function to highlight current experiences in six different hotel companies and identifies their engagement in high degrees of social control. This result may be easily understood where the company both owns and operates its properties; however, the evidence suggests that franchising, a mechanism which is often seen as allowing hotel unit investors or franchisees considerable latitude in running the operation, is also susceptible to social control through management transfer and development policies.

This chapter aims to examine the ways coaching and mentoring are currently leveraged to deliver leadership development in higher education institutions. By exploring the variety of coaching and mentoring approaches and their deployment at different levels and across different institutions we are able to indicate opportunities for further enhancing leadership development in the sector through coaching and mentoring. The chapter examines peer-reviewed articles, sector reports and insights from key informants crafted into mini case studies. Mentoring emerges as a default approach to leadership development, in particular at early career stages and where inclusivity and diversity feature as part of leadership development programmes. Coaching is evident at the senior levels and offers a wider range of individual leader, senior team and organisational leadership development opportunities. Our cases highlight the range of responses and sophistication of coaching approaches and practices, from the highly embedded to other more piecemeal examples. The findings emphasise the importance of empirical research in this area to better understand and inform the sector of the wider benefits and opportunities of coaching and mentoring in supporting leadership development. Opportunities to support greater inclusivity and diversity in leadership should consider coaching approaches and practices too. This exploration of coaching and mentoring identifies why shifts towards coaching may be evident. It challenges those in the sector – researchers, people management and organisational developers, as well as senior leaders – to adopt more integrated and embedded coaching and mentoring initiatives to support the sector in addressing its current challenges.

This paper aims to identify the extent to which hospitality management degree programmes are internationalised to develop graduates capable of working within the global hospitality industry.

A qualitative multiple case study approach was adopted for a UK study of undergraduate international hospitality management degrees. Interviews and document analysis were used as the data collection techniques.

The findings reveal the importance of the development of graduates' cross‐cultural competencies within international hospitality management programmes and the methods used to develop these. The study also reveals further opportunities to enhance the internationalisation of degree programmes.

The findings are based on a case study research strategy set within the context of the UK and as such, the generalisability of the findings may be limited. In addition, the study sample contained only undergraduate international hospitality management degree programmes.

This paper reveals a number of opportunities to enhance the internationalisation of hospitality management programmes and the challenges currently faced by academics and students.

The paper provides a framework comprising internationalisation at home (IaH) and internationalisation abroad (IA) dimensions for academics to assess the internationalisation of degree programmes and the extent to which cross‐cultural competencies are developed among graduates. The framework can also be used by graduate recruiters seeking candidates with the requisite cross‐cultural understanding, attitudes and skills to work within the international hospitality industry.

This article aims to explore how understanding the challenges faced by companies' attempts to create competitive advantage through their human resources and HRM practices can be enhanced by insights into the concept of strategic groups within industries. Based within the international hotel industry, this study identifies how strategic groups emerge in the analysis of HRM practices and approaches. It sheds light on the value of strategic groups as a way of readdressing the focus on firm and industry level analyses.

Senior human resource executives and their teams across eight international hotel companies (IHCs) were interviewed in corporate and regional headquarters, with observations and the collection of company documentation complementing the interviews.

The findings demonstrate that strategic groups emerge from analysis of the HRM practices and strategies used to develop hotel general managers (HGMs) as strategic human resources in the international hotel industry. The value of understanding industry structures and dynamics and intermediary levels of analysis are apparent where specific industries place occupational constraints on their managerial resources and limit the range of strategies and expansion modes companies can adopt.

This study indicates that further research on strategic groups will enhance the theoretical understanding of strategic human resource management and specifically the forces that act to constrain the achievement of competitive advantage through human resources. A limitation of this study is the dependence on the human resource divisions' perspectives on realising international expansion ambitions in the hotel industry.

This study has implications for companies' engagement with their executives' perceptions of opportunities and threats, and suggests companies will struggle to achieve competitive advantage where such perceptions are consistent with their competitors.

Developments in strategic human resource management have relied on the conceptual and theoretical developments in strategic management, however, an understanding of the impact of strategic groups and their shaping of SHRM has not been previously explored.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how commercial hospitality has catalysed sustainable social change in Nepal through empowering women. Utilising a new framework, developed by combining existing theories, empowerment of women tea house owners/managers is assessed.

Within a critical feminist paradigm, primary research consisting of interviews and participant observation was undertaken over a three‐month period in the central region of Nepal.

Involvement in the hospitality industry improved the livelihoods of the women tea house owners/managers, it also has the potential to facilitate sustainable empowerment for future generations, providing them with education, choice, control and opportunities.

Although steps are taken to limit rhetorical issues, language barriers could have influenced the findings of the interviews. To fully investigate the potential for hospitality to act as a vehicle for the sustainable empowerment of women, it is suggested that this study be replicated again in another region or that a detailed ethnographic study be carried out.

The paper demonstrates how the commercial hospitality industry can be a force for good; women working in the industry are agents of change, actively improving their levels of empowerment in their immediate environment. The commercial hospitality industry has pioneered the empowerment of women and this could lay the foundation for the further emancipation of women.

To date, there has been limited research into the relationship between involvement in the commercial hospitality sector and the empowerment of women; this paper begins to fill this gap by investigating a tourist region of Nepal.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, empirically, the value relevance of the degree of internationalization in publicly traded restaurant firms in the USA.

Data for the study were obtained from the Compustat Industrial Annual. Pearson correlation analysis, regression analysis, and Vuong's Z‐test were employed to analyze the data.

The paper has two principal findings: the degree of internationalization is positively and significantly related to market capitalization; and the relation is strong enough to cause an 18.3 percent increase in the explanatory power, in the presence of control variables.

The method of expansion might have some impact on market capitalization and this is not explicitly controlled for in the study due to data and cost constraints. Moreover, there are likely other variables affecting firms' market capitalization, but due to data constraints, they are also not included in the model.

The results indicate firms, which decide to diversify abroad, see their market capitalization changes positively with the degree of internationalization.

There are many studies that investigate the behavior of firms that diversify abroad; however, this is the first study to the authors' knowledge that examines the impact of the degree of internationalization on the stock market capitalization in the hospitality industry.

The study aims to explore major internationally operating hotel groups and their corporate diversity statements. An understanding of these statements is critical for the analysis of workforce diversity actions, as they shape the policy framework and basis for any diversity management (DM) program or initiative.

The study applied a qualitative content analysis of corporate web sites. The analysis and evaluation of the data was not treated in statistical terms or in any quantifiable measures due to the study's rather exploratory and inductive nature. Moving away from traditional forms of validity and reliability, this study applied Denzin and Lincoln's authenticity criteria.

Most of the selected hotel companies with diversity management strategies and policies need to communicate their diversity management activities and actions more extensively and clearly via their corporate web sites to help support employee recruitment efforts, attraction of talents with different educational and cultural backgrounds, development of multiple (minority) supplier relations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) image, and accessibility into new markets.

This study should be seen as a starting point with some of the arguments and conclusions to be reconfirmed with more case‐study based explorations of corporate DM policies and their translation into operational actions and programs.

Communicating in a more effective and structured way, corporate or operational diversity strategies and activities via corporate web sites will provide hotel organizations with a key sustainable competitive advantage in talent recruitment, CSR and market accessibility.

This study provides a starting point for better understanding corporate diversity management in the global hotel industry.