Executive Summary
This report evaluates the leadership and management challenges and their solutions. The report is centred on two case studies of Starbucks and Toyota. This report finds that employee motivation and satisfaction are critical concerns in contemporary organisations. This challenge is significantly related to the demographic changes from the socio-cultural dimensions of the PESTEL analysis. Several issues are associated with employee motivation and satisfaction, including the working environment, sufficient rewards, and people practices. Drawing from the Toyota case, this report reveals that people practices, including performance management are essential in promoting employee motivation, satisfaction, and retention. Another challenge is leading change. Leaders, therefore, have to apply an effective change management model, such as Kotter that involves the workforce in the decision-making process. From the analysis, four recommendations in relation to the two challenges include investing in communication, leadership and management and development, continuous environmental scanning, and stakeholder involvement in the decision-making process.
Table of Contents
2.0 Leadership and Management Challenges Within the Current Business Environment 3
2.1 Demographic Dynamics: Employee Satisfaction and Motivation. 4
2.2 Change Management: Leading Change. 6
3.2 Change Management (500) 10
Management and Organisational Behaviour
1.0 Introduction
Profound leadership and management is central in a company’s performance. As described by Shah (2018), there are four tenets of effective leadership, which include behaviour, communication style, leadership model, and ethics. Behaviour focuses on the values, culture, and norms advocated while the leadership style entails a selection of the suitable approach according to the firm’s needs and structure. Leadership models in this regard include transformational, autocratic, and democratic, which are distinguished by the relationship between the leaders and their employees and autonomy. Leadership ethics comprise of the fairness, power sharing, integrity, and sustainability concerns, which are also related to the firm’s culture.
Leadership is also significantly related to the firm’s behaviour, describing how employees conduct themselves. The firm’s behaviour is centred on several elements. As noted by Huang (2021), these aspects include employee satisfaction, motivation, commitment, and relationship between various stakeholders. This introduces the importance of organisational strategies to develop and promote the workforce satisfaction, which is also related to other concepts, including retention and performance. The role of the leadership and management team is to evaluate these factors and how they can be managed. Some of the strategies as outlined by Sonmez Cakir and Adiguzel (2020) include learning and development, performance management, informed decision-making, and organisational development, which are associated with the employees and organisational performance. These areas reflect on the role of people practices in the company’s behaviour.
1.1 Purpose of the Report
Leadership and management faces several challenges stemming from the internal and external factors impacting the company. This report evaluates two of these challenges, including the demographic issues and leading change. Also included in the discussion is how to address the issues and case analysis. The discussion draws from various models and theories including leadership, organisational development, and design.
2.0 Leadership and Management Challenges Within the Current Business Environment
Strategic leadership and management is centred on promoting the sustainable performance of the organisation. According to O’Shannassy (2021), strategic leaders are essential in delivering the sustainable social, economic, and environmental outcomes. This relates to the Tripple Bottom Line (TBL) model. As described by Birkel and Muller (2021), the TBL framework transcends the company’s focus on profit. The model can be distinguished into 3Ps, including the people, planet, and profit. Drawing from the TBL model, the leadership approach is also faced with several challenges in line with the three Ps. For instance, besides the issues that strategic leaders face in meeting the financial key performance indicators, there are also impediments in meeting the employees’ needs. The sustainable-related issues are based on the broad strategic planning to ensure the company achieves the sustainability goals. This also involves the company ensuring that the goals and objectives are aligned with the environmental sustainability laws and regulations.
Leadership and management challenges can be profoundly described by the internal and external factors. This introduces the importance of environmental scanning concept. As espoused by Hayati (2021), the importance of an environmental scan is to determine the events and trends impacting the company. These include talent shortage, the rising number of expatriate workers, and the employees age profile. Conducting an environmental scan involves the application of various tools and models, including SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and PESTEL (political, economic, socio-cultural, technology, environmental, and legal). The importance of these tools is to evaluate the specific factors that impact the company and how they can be strategically addressed. For instance, the current trends in organisations is the application of information and communication technology (ICT) in all activities, including people practices. The technology dimension of the PESTEL analysis evaluates these trends, including robotics, artificial intelligence, data management, and automation and how the company can invest in ensuring availability of these skills for sustainable competitive advantage.
2.1 Demographic Dynamics: Employee Satisfaction and Motivation
The socio-cultural dimension of PESTEL analysis focuses on aspects such as demographics, customer needs and preferences, purchasing trends and patterns, employment patterns, and population change. As described by Abdullah et al. (2022), the social element of the PESTEL analysis focuses on the cultural diversity of various stakeholders. The role of strategic leadership is to ensure that all stakeholders, regardless of their diversity, such as age, gender, race, and ethnicity have their needs adequately addressed. Among the key stakeholders is the employees, who are central to the achievement of the organisational goals and objectives. Effective leadership, therefore, is centred on ensuring that all the employees’ needs and preferences are met. Throughout the employee lifecycle, all the people practices should be aimed at sufficing the employees’ preferences.
Demographic changes, however, reflect on the changing employee profile in terms of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Globalisation has increased the number of expatriates in various organisations (Hayati, 2021). The leadership and management challenge from the demographic changes is ensuring that the employees are motivated and satisfied. In the contemporary organisations, the demographic changes are mainly reflected in the increasing millennials and generation Z in the workplace. As described by Wood (2019), the increase in the number of millennials at the workplace present new dynamics that leaders and managers have to contend with. The influence of technology among this generation characterises the millennials and generation Z as technology natives, craving for work-life balance, interested in collaboration, preference for being involved in the decision-making process, the need to keep learning, and fickle loyalty. Unlike the leadership and management for the baby boomers, the leaders for the current workforce has to ensure that the employees are satisfied and motivated, a significant challenge considering the diverse needs and preferences.
There are several factors associated with employee motivation and satisfaction at the workplace. According to Paais and Pattiruhu (2020), the quality of human management resources plays a vital role in ensuring that all employees’ needs have been met. The leader’s role is to ensure that the company equates the employees’ perspectives, value, and expectations, which are aligned with reward management and relationship with the leadership and management. Meeting the employees’ needs and preferences is can be described using the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. According to Fallatah and Syed (2018), Maslow hierarchy of needs espouses that the individual’s motivation is centred on various needs. The needs are classified in a pyramid and comprise of physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualisation. The organisational leadership and management challenge, therefore, is to ensure that the employees’ needs are achieved. For instance, security needs are met through a safe working environment and job security. Among the primary concerns for leaders and managers is to determine the employees’ needs from various dynamics and develop strategic plans on how they can be achieved.
Employee satisfaction and motivation is anchored on various aspects, including the culture and system. Potential solutions to promoting motivation and satisfaction among the employees, in relation to leadership are based on the model. In the transformational leadership theory, for instance, Kotamena et al. (2020) notes that the leaders and managers drive transparency, communication, and autonomy for the employees. Autonomy involves allowing the employees to make their decisions and avoiding micro-management. Another leadership model related to employee motivation and satisfaction is democratic, which focuses on involving the employees in the decision making process. This increases their confidence and commitment, which are related to motivation, satisfaction, and commitment. Another potential approach is learning and development, which is related to performance management. This allows the leadership and management to evaluate the employees’ strengths and weaknesses and provide insights on the learning and development strategies. Performance management is also related to strategic and total rewards, which are also related to employee motivation and satisfaction.
2.2 Change Management: Leading Change
Change management is crucial in ensuring that the company’s strategies are aligned with the current and future needs…….
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