MD4042 Leading, Managing & Developing People Assignment Sample
Introduction
The following report is based on; Unilever is facing a few challenges in the business environment which will be briefly discussed in this report. One of the important challenges, which needs to be addressed by the company in risk management, Unilever does not have a proper risk management strategy to handle the different ethical and cultural issues the company is facing (Tien, 2019). Lack of proper risk management strategy can become an important factor behind the slow growth of the company in recent years. Another challenge that Unilever is currently facing is the establishment of customer relationships with the company (Sivakumar, 2021). The company needs to design a proper strategy to establish a strong relationship with the customers as it is a key factor contributing to a company’s growth and development.
Figure 1: Unilever PLC
(Source: Unilever, 2021)
Brief about Unilever
Unilever PLC is a United Kingdom-based multinational company, which was established on 2 September 1929 by Antonius Johannes Jurgens, Samuel van den Bergh and Georg Schicht. The company has its headquarters located in London, United Kingdom (Unilever, 2022). The current CEO of the company is Alan Jope who was appointed as the CEO in the year 2019. The company’s approximate value is 4.16 billion US dollars. Unilever’s mission statement is “to add vitality to life”. According to a report as of 2020 the company employed approximately 149,000 workers globally (Unilever, 2022). The company sells a wide variety of products including foods, beverages, personal care, home appliances and others.
Maintaining sustainability in the products and services provided by the company is a huge challenge for the company to handle. Unilever provides a big number of products to the customers and in this era everyone is more inclined towards using the sustainable products as global warming and pollution is a big concern for the world (Cheng, 2021). Hence, to avoid this problem consumers mainly focus on utilizing sustainable products, this is a difficult challenge for Unilever to introduce sustainable products and services. Apart from these, supply chain management is also a challenge for the company to overcome.
Culture of Unilever
Allan Jape mainly focuses on transformational leadership which causes a change in the individual and social systems. In its ideal form, transformational leadership helps in creating valuable and positive change within the followers having the aim of developing the followers into leaders. The organizational culture of Unilever mainly focuses on performance such as individual performance and organizational performance. The culture mainly focuses on getting authentic quality output in every area possible. The leader mainly emphasizes on getting efficient work through the help of technology and other types of equipment (Tien, 2020). The transformational leadership style of the leader has made things honest, ethical and open at the company. The clan culture in this company is suitable with the transformational leadership style of the leader.
Organizational culture that Unilever follows comes under the category of clan culture. By following this culture, the company aims to work in teams collaboratively. Unilever focuses on making sure that all the employees in the company are being treated equally and fairly. In this culture usually high employee engagement which eventually leads to better customer service (Costa et al. 2020). In clan culture the employees feel free and comfortable to share their opinions and feedback. This culture puts a strong emphasis on mentorship in order to pass the company’s values and vision from one generation to another. One drawback of clan culture is that it is quite difficult to maintain with the growth of the organization.
Leadership style of CEO
Through the maintenance of this leadership style, the employees are encouraged to focus on the current task and act in the best interest of the organisation to get a positive outcome. Allan Jope mainly provides the opportunity for the employees to express their opinions and views in an open way which increases their confidence. This makes the employees believe that they are a valuable part of the organisation which increases their engagement towards the work thereby increasing their productivity of performance. However, it can be stated that the transformational leadership style of Jope is aligned with the individual and organisational performance-oriented culture of Unilever (Sharma, Khandelwal, and Agrawal, 2018). Therefore, change management can be done conveniently within the organisation without any kind of reluctance from the employees. The employees will act in the interest of the organisation in an emergency or difficult situation. Transformational leadership mainly helps in encouraging learning within the employees and stimulates creativity within them. This is aligned with the culture of the company that focuses on individual performance and the positive output of different projects. It reduces the rate of employee turnover.
Figure 2: 4 Elements of Transformational leaders
(Source: Based on the ideas of Tien, 2020)
Transformational leadership is mainly dependent on the intrinsic motivation provided to the employees for working hard (Godelier, 2020). If the employees will not feel connected with the vision of the company then there will be a lack of intrinsic motivation. Sometimes transformational leadership led to workplace conflicts as Jope tried to favour some employees due to the performance instead of focusing on upskilling the other employees. This has led to confusion within the workforce in some instances. Therefore, the inspirational characteristics of Jope have been helpful to eradicate the conflict within the workplace by conducting discussion sessions with them and understanding their issues (Lemus-Aguilar et al., 2019). The leader has tried to act on the issue in the fast possible manner by knowing the gap in skills of some employees by providing suitable training and development programs for them. This has removed the chances of workplace conflict thereby, the CEO attained success in Unilever through transformational leadership style (Unilever, 2022). However, it can be stated that the transformational leadership behaviour followed by the CEO has been successful in getting positive outputs from the employees and up skilling them in order to enhance their productivity or performance along with earning profitability for the organisation.
Main characteristics of Unilever
The organisational culture of Unilever as identified above that plays a major role in determining how the human resources of the organisation would be utilised by the leader of the company. It has been seen that their organisational culture present within Unilever is tightly knit which allows the leaders as well as the employees to have better communication at different levels (Tien, 2019). Moreover, it has also been seen that the leaders of the organisation adopt a transformational leadership style due to its issues within the organisation, especially at the internal levels do not persist for a long period of time.
Figure 3: Link between the leader’s behaviour and the organisations culture
(Source: Based on the ideas of Tien, 2020)
One of the prime aspects of the organisation’s culture is to focus upon performance and in this regard, the leaders play a major role in influencing the performance and productivity of employees working on them. Employees working at Unilever maintain a close relationship with other leaders which help them in achieving their goals and understanding their objectives in a much more effective manner (Lanza and Giangiulio, 2018).
Apart from that, another aspect of the organisation’s culture is a focus on quality and in this regard quality refers to the output and productivity. In order to maintain the productivity of the workforce the leaders of the organisation employ several strategies to keep the workforce motivated. The factors that determine the motivation of employees within the workforce are carefully looked after by the management and leadership due to which their employees are quite satisfied working in the organisation (Tawfig and Kamarudin, 2021).
How Unilever is achieving its goals
Unilever also focuses upon the efficiency of the workforce in terms of the capability to achieve the objectives and goals of the organisation. This is one of the main factors that has helped Unilever to adopt an organisational culture growth opportunities for the organisation as well as the employees within the organisation can be elevated. In order to improve the efficiency of the workforce, Unilever focuses upon knowledge transfer and regular communication which helps in improving the existing skillsets of employees to a far better level.
Hence, reflecting upon the organisational culture it can be stated that the role of leaders is quite significant which helps in driving performance (Murphy and Murphy, 2018). When it comes to the market share of Unilever it has been seen that the market sir USA is the largest and most profitable market in which the organisation operates. In the USA reorganisation contributes to about 18% of all the FMCG products set by the organisation, which includes items within personal hygiene cleaning agents and other products. The product research development sales marketing and customer service are all influenced by the leadership of the organisation and to achieve the required objectives set by the management the leaders focus upon productivity efficiency and performance of their workforce (Reza, 2020). It can be stated that the organisational culture followed in Unilever plays a major role in determining how the human resources would achieve the objectives as well as the way leaders conduct resource management to achieve their goals and objectives.
Current challenges faced by Unilever
Performance of the human resources
It has been seen that the organisation specifically focuses upon the performance of the human resources and elevating the human resource performance than directly influencing the overall business performance (Raj and Aithal, 2018). Rather, it can be stated that the business performance of the organisation is indirectly influenced by how effectively the human resources achieve their goals and objectives. It has also been seen that the human resources of the organisation are quite extensive due to which leaders are not required to indulge in micromanagement, which can be time and resource consuming. Apart from that, with an actively functioning workforce, Unilever has ensured that the performance of the human resources at each level helps in adding growth to the organisation in the global market (Onifade et al. 2018).
Efficiency in terms of achieving objectives
The organisation also focuses upon the ability of the workforce to develop efficiency in terms of developing capability it can help them to achieve their given objectives. Additionally, it has been seen that Unilever has been quite consistent in terms of increasing this is especially during the covid-19 pandemic and other demands for FMCG products especially products belonging to the personal hygiene category drastically increased (Anitahet al. 2019). This was a crucial time period when the human resources of the organisation played a major role in focusing upon the new market communication strategy and the overall branding which can help the organisation to reflect its brand values.
Focus on quality of products and services
The quality of products and services is another aspect that has been identified as a major part of the organisation’s culture and it can be stated that the quality of products and services play a major role in determining business performance (Onifadeet al. 2018). Since the FMCG industry in which Unilever operates deals with a less profit margin upon individual products the volume of sales is high. Due to this, maintaining the quality of the individual product becomes an important aspect for maintaining a dominant position in the market (Sar, 2018). Quality issues in one particular product of an organisation impact its overall product portfolio and this can also lead to a lack of consumer loyalty and favourability (Juraboevich, 2021).
Close communication and interaction
Communication and interaction among the employees of Uniliver is another aspect that has been identified as a major component of the organisational culture (Shaikat, 2020). A better and defined line of communications within a workforce always helps an organisation to achieve better performance in the market. This is because internal and external communication helps in maintaining better relationships with customers as well as the different stakeholders of the organisation (Piehler et al. 2019).
Recommendations
One of the main targets of this organisation is to increase individual performance, in this aspect; the leaders play a key role in increasing the productivity of the employees. The power distance index within this organisation is very low. Therefore it can be stated that the authority board are in a close relationship with the organisational employees. It is helpful to make the employees feel valued within the organisation (Musa et al. 2018). It has been found out that this low power distance within the employees and the authority boards have been helpful for the company to assess the emergency situation in the fast possible manner. Quality enhancement is one of the primary aspects of organisational culture in Unilever. The main strategy of this organisation needs to be the ability to motivate the workforce through incentives and providing bonuses (Daniel, 2019).
The clan culture and transformational leadership in this organisation have influenced their human resources department to understand the issues of the employees and provide them with good benefits based on their performance. The objectives or deadline for the project has been met successfully. Due to the transformational leadership style and clan culture, close interaction and communication have been favourable for providing good quality products or services to the customers. Therefore, creating the scope for the employees where they can express their issues without any kind of fear to the leader is essential for the HRM (Salau et al. 2018). his type of approach by the authoritative board solves the problem from its roots and a constructive approach is taken to find the solution for a particular problem.
Conclusion
From the above analysis, it can be stated that Unilever PLC is an influential organisation in the field of retail. Presently, Unilever is facing some challenges related to the environment of business. It has been found that Unilever does not have an appropriate strategy of risk management to assess emergency situations. In recent years, Unilever has experienced slow growth due to the lack of a risk management strategy. There is a lack of a proper strategy to build relationships with the customers in a prominent way. Gaining sustainability has been a challenge for the company as which the pollution caused by the products is increasing. This is degrading the interest of the customers towards the products of the company. Unilever follows clan culture which mainly involves team working or working in collaboration. Fair and equal treatment given to the employees comes under the category of clan culture. On the other hand, it should be noted that Alan Jope mainly follows transformational leadership which is in line with the clan culture.
The vision of getting authentic a positive output through increasing individual and organisational performance is aligned with the transformational leadership of the job. It is due to the fact that the transformational leadership of this CEO mainly contains the approaches of providing the opportunity to the employees for sharing their views and opinions openly to the managerial board. In this way, the diversification of ideas takes place and confidence within the employees increases highly.
References
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