Factors In Organisations That Influence Leadership Styles Management Essay

The success or failure of the company in a certain industry does not depend on the size of the business. Some companies started only as a small or medium enterprise but eventually became big and known internationally. It doesn’t matter how much is your capital, how many employees do you have or how small or big your office is. What matter is how you will manage to make it profitable and how to stay in the business for long, especially now that there are lots of competitors in any kind of industry. Big companies not necessarily mean they are successful because maybe they started with a big capital. Success is a vision of flowing profits, industry respect and when it attracts customers. And how can we achieve it? Well, the success of the business depends on the effective management and leadership. As the course assignment implies, I assume the position of a Senior Manager in a food/restaurant industry and the job entails me to apply concepts of leadership and management in my own management situation.

The Management Standards Centre states that the key purpose of management and leadership is to ‘provide direction, facilitate change and achieve results through the efficient, creative and responsible use of resources. These purposes are analysed as providing direction, facilitating change, achieving results, meeting customer needs, working with people, using resources and managing self and personal skills ( Armstrong 2004).

A. FACTORS IN ORGANISATIONS THAT INFLUENCE LEADERSHIP STYLES

The leader – leader’s knowledge and skills can influence the choice of style in leadership. Just like what other people said, lessons can be best learned through experience and so, as a leader, previous experiences whether good or bad can be used as a basis in identifying which is more effective in choosing a leadership style.

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The group – The group members’ experience levels, their maturity when it comes to work attitudes and the group’s size can also influence leadership style. Supervising a big group will not be a problem if the subordinates are all motivated and approach will depend on this group of people.

The situation – leadership style also depends on each situation. The nature of task, time constraint, environment and other external forces can also influence like if there are target dates, the leader can choose an approach that will fit the need to meet the timeline.

Working with an international company means you can be assigned to any of its branches and will be handling different kinds of people with different personalities, culture and behavior. Being the Senior Manager, styles that effectively worked in the past experiences will be taken into consideration in choosing the leadership style to achieve leadership goal. Since I will decide on this matter, I will initially observe my employee, how are they as a person, their behavior and attitude towards work, what their special skills are and how they react into different situations. Can these people perform well on their own or they need closely monitoring and detailed instructions even in small tasks? From there I can create a plan on how to manage them and what leadership style to use in order to lead them into a better and improved management.

B. REASONS WHY LEADERSHIP STYLES ARE LIKELY TO AFFECT TEAM BUILDING.

There are different leadership styles that can be used to provide direction and motivate people. The three major styles are the following:

Authoritarian or autocratic

Participative or democratic

Delegative or free reign

Typically, factors from the inside and outside of the organization can directly or indirectly influence the choice of leadership styles. For me, participative style where the employees can also be involved in the decision making process is effective, but of course, I as Senior Manager maintains the final decision making authority. It is important that they are involved because we should work as a team and if they feel that they are part of the decision making even in just a small way, I can build an effective working relationship with them. This style with participation from the subordinates is important because their ideas and opinions can help improve the team’s performance. It can bring out the best in a team to ensure self development, positive communication, leadership skills and the ability to work closely together as a team to solve problems. It also encourages employees to grow on the job and be promoted.

If authoritarian or autocratic style will be used, some employees usually misunderstood it as bossing people around which tends to create a distance between the leader and its followers though we should also take note that all situations are different. What you do in one situation will not always work in another. You must use your judgment to decide the best course of action and the leadership style needed for each situation.

C. LEADERSHIP MODEL

Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory (Two Factor Theory)

To determine factors that caused satisfaction or dissatisfaction in an employee’s work environment and to better understand employee attitudes and motivation, Frederick Herzberg performed studies for these. Also included in these studies is interviewing about what pleased and displeased in their work. He found that causing job satisfaction were different from causing job dissatisfaction. He developed the motivation-hygiene theory to explain these results.

The following table presents the top six factors causing dissatisfaction and the top six factors causing satisfaction, listed in the order of higher to lower importance.

Factors Affecting Job Attitudes

Leading to Dissatisfaction

   Leading to Satisfaction   

Company policy

Supervision

Relationship w/Boss

Work conditions

Salary

Relationship w/Peers

Achievement

Recognition

Work itself

Responsibility

Advancement

Growth

Objectives and aims of the a food chain restaurant business are not only to sell to make money and make a profit, they are to expand as a business to be a worldwide business or just to open up more restaurants around the world to provide good service to customers and consistently deliver superior quality and value in products and services. As a Senior Manager, I want my subordinates to develop habits that drive business success so I need to inspire and motivate them and give them a clear and exciting vision of achieving goals and objectives. With reference to leadership model, it helps us to understand what makes leaders act the way we do and below are approaches that leaders can use to effectively achieve extraordinary results.

All the efforts and hard works of an employee should be recognized for them to feel that it is all worth it. Recognition can give them more motivation to do better and to continuously innovate so that they will be given an award or reward every time they have remarkable achievements and special accomplishments. It gives them moral and spiritual support receiving such recognitions and encourages them to do more. Continuous seminars and trainings on all employees are also needed for their advancement. Conducting trainings on effective selling and quality service should be effected every year to enhance their knowledge and improve their personality as well. A job well done and reaching the team’s goal means an achievement on both the leader and his followers.

USING 360 DEGREE FEEDBACK

Operation Management has a big role in an organisation. The purpose or goal involves the production of goods and/or services. To perform this, there should be plans on how to do it and implement them, convert them into outputs and distribute them to their intended users. This operation embraces all activities required to deliver and create goods or services to customers.

According to the Operational Research Society: Operational Research (OR), also known as Operations Research or Management Science (OR/MS), mathematical, computer models, or other analytical approaches are being used to find ways on how to do the operations effectively.

After implementation of all the plans, we can use the 360 degree feedback to ensure that the plans and guidelines are being followed. The purpose of feedback, whether it is purely for development or as part of a performance appraisal process, will influence implementation decisions.

A mystery client survey can be used to check if the employees are performing their task according to the implemented guidelines. An unknown person will act as a regular customer and will rate the service of the employees according to the behaviors which relate to actual job performance. With these, since the employees are aware that at anytime, anybody from the customers can be the mystery client who will rate them, there will always be a conscious effort on their part to do their best to every customer which eventually can become a good habit and comes out naturally. Greeting the customers good morning, good afternoon and giving thank you with a smile is a big factor in this survey. How they service the customers, the turn-around-time and over-all job performance including the clean environment are some of the criteria of the mystery client survey to check feedback.

IMPORTANCE OF EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVELY USE OF TEAM’S KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

Leadership and management isn’t simply a technical discipline. A large part of the role involves building effective working relationships with a whole range of people and sometimes in challenging circumstances. Delivering good products and quality service is a team effort. The success of the branch is also the success of everyone. A mistake of one employee can reflect as fault of the company as a whole, so, it is very important to make effective and efficient use of your team’s knowledge and skills while planning work objectives in order to produce a sound management. Pascale (1990) wrote that successful companies can use conflict to stay ahead: ‘we are almost better serve when conflict is surface and channeled, not suppressed.’ The pursuit of teamwork should not lead to a ‘bland’ climate in an organization in which nothing new or challenging ever happens. Leaders know how to make people function in a collaborative fashion, and how to motivate them to excel their performance. Leaders also know how to balance  the individual team member’s quest with the goal of producing synergy as an outcome that exceeds the sum of individual inputs. Leaders require that their team members forego the quest for personal best in concert with the team effort. Waterman (1988), noted that team work requires people to pull together towards a set of goals or values.

My employees have their own different skills, the cashiers, chef, waiters and waitresses and all other staff which they can share and contribute in delivering quality service to our customers. Even simple things like ideas on what they will do to create a nice ambience to work with and for our customers to have are a big role in the company’s work objectives. An idea of each worker when all combined together can effectively send us to where we really wanted to be in this business.

According to Armstrong (2004), competence is about knowledge and skills – what people need to know and be able to do to carry out their work well. Knowledge and skill requirement (expectations) can be agreed simply by discussing with individuals what they need to know and be able to do with regard to each of the main task areas in their job.

A. BARRIER’S ON DELEGATION IN A WORKPLACE

One of the major barriers to delegation is the manager’s understandable anxiety that things cannot be done well if others will do the job and if they don’t do it themselves. This feeling of not trusting other people’s skills and capabilities became barriers in delegation of works especially when there are pressures due to timelines and deadlines. Leaders sometimes felt the pressure that subordinates might not do the tasks correctly and in time so might as well do it themselves. As much as they want to delegate some tasks or jobs, they thought that it will be easier for them to do it than delegating, going into details and monitoring at the same time if subordinates are doing the right thing (McCrimmon 2007).

IV.B. MECHANISM TO SUPPORT DELEGATION IN A WORKPLACE

An effective manager should delegate in order to develop the subordinates and an overload of work could force managers to delegate especially when there are timelines and deadlines. Delegating works will also serve as a training ground for the employees in handling certain tasks and will enhance their decision making capabilities with the help of course of the manager. Since each employee has their own skills and specialization, a manager should know the appropriate person whom to give the task or assignment especially when the job requires special competence. Objectives and output should be clearly defined and there will be a delegated person in each department like in the kitchen, inventories, deliveries, crews and services assigned to make sure that objectives will be met.

TECHNIQUES USED IN A DELEGATION

Effective managers are those who focus on learning and utilizing management techniques that lead to increased productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, and customer satisfaction and employee development. One of the effective management techniques that can be used to monitor outcomes of delegation is by coaching.

According to Brounstein (2002), coaching a team means working on two levels: the group level and one on one. That means shaping the talents of individual team members and then fitting them together in a powerful single unit – the team. Managing a team requires the application of a certain set of skills that you may not have needed much when you were in charge of a department of amiable and cooperative but basically independent workers. If you want to become an effective team leader, you have to make adjustment, too. Many managers try to be good bosses. They assert themselves and have good control over their groups. There’s a different functions and compares in a way a coach of a team handles them and the responds of the boss in a work group. First, in communication with the staff, decision making, planning, control and responsibility to the group as a coach of team they have a two-way interactions, the team involves in the issues and they pushes accountability so that team members share in what affects the team as a whole. On the other-hand as a boss in a work group they have more one-way interactions, makes most decisions and they are responsibility for the group. Second in their outcomes as a coach they need to focus on the performance results while boss focused on the business. Third, with guidance the coach frequent on giving feedbacks, clarifies direction, gets resources and the boss guide more by telling people what to do. In this case it is much better to become a coach rather than to become a boss.

Teams need leadership to develop and perform, but managers who are absorbed in the work and control it with a heavy hand aren’t providing the leadership that teams need. Their effort lessens teamwork and heightens dependency – the opposites of what you want to achieve in managing a team.

Another technique is Monitoring Employee Performance. As a Senior Manager, I still need to check if the target goal in those specific areas has been reached. I need reports from the delegated persons so I can verify the result since the task in hand is critical in the success of the business. Monitoring is a process that is carried out by the manager continuously, with employee evaluations occurring frequently. As managers implement a continual monitoring process, it becomes possible to document performance that meets standards, as well as performance that falls below expectations of the organization. Manager feedback then provides the opportunity for ongoing improvement.