The Action Of Leading People In An Organization: Leadership

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Part 1
Leadership is the action of leading people in an organization. A leader is any individual who communicates plans and policies of a company to the subordinate staff members. Therefore, managing leadership has become an interesting topic of learning that will help in improving my future career. The topic has various importance to students who want to develop in their future careers. First considering the trait theory of leadership, those who have the right characters and qualities are believed to be better suited for leadership. The qualities include accountability, integrity and honesty, good communication skills, decision maker, confidence, and delegation. The skills are important in improving the relationship between a manager and its subordinates. Junior staff members will feel motivated with good leadership which consequently will lead to high production and low cost to a firm through reduced training cost as skilled workers will be retained.
More so, the importance of leadership management can be seen by considering the behavioral theory of leadership. The theory states that the behaviors of leaders are the best determinants of their leadership success. Hence, the theory gives a better market potential as people are considered to respond to a given stimulus. Some of the good behaviors that a manager should possess include observing, coaching and mentoring, encouraging, and listening (Mikušová, Marie and Andrea 162). Finally, situational and interpersonal theories also explain the importance of leadership. The situational theory states that the performance of workers depend on the favorableness of the situation and the style of leadership. The theory depicts that some leaders perform better in a specific situation. Also, the leadership style should be matched with subordinate’s maturity.
Leadership management is important in developing the future career of students because it helps in motivating employees which ultimately leads to high production as workers will be more engaged in their job. High productivity is evident if managers delegate tasks effectively by first determining employees’ weaknesses and strengths. An efficient delegation of duties improves output which ultimately leads to increase in revenue and income. Similarly, improving workers morale will make them more loyal to the firm. A loyal employee believes in his or her manager and will be willing to work harder as well as stay with the company even in difficult times.
Contrarily, leadership management may be irrelevant to one’s career considering the time value for money and clash of personalities. First considering the time value of money, leadership is a nonproductive activity in that it involves spending time instructing and leading employees to ensure that they perform their duties appropriately. The time spent in instructing employees can be utilized in other productive areas (Hagan, Jacqueline and Joshua 513). More so, Leaders and workers rarely see each other face to face. Therefore, the employees may mentally develop an attitude of “us versus them,’’ which may result into a disagreement between them and the managers. Consequently, there will be a lot of time that will be wasted on solving the disputes which may lead to a reduction in productivity.
The theory has a lot of criticisms as there is no clear standard for measuring the traits and behaviors of a leader. Every leader has a different approach to its leadership. However, the approach may be considered effective by some people while others may consider it ineffective. The effectiveness of leadership style depends on the environment in which it is applied and the people to which it is applied to. Hence, there is no one leadership style that is right for every manager under all situations. Therefore, the lack of a clear standard for measuring leadership style has led to several criticisms of leadership management theory.
Part 2
McDonald’s company is one of the largest fast food restaurants with its headquarters in the US and approximately 35,000 subsidiary restaurants located globally in over 100 nations. The company is well established as it serves around 70 million customers daily internationally. Some of the products of McDonald’s include Big Mac, Chicken McNuggets, Filet-O-Fish, McGriddles, Mc Flurry, and McCafe ("Mcdonald's Corporation SWOT Analysis." 3). The firm operates across Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, North America, and Europe. The firm makes large revenue and profits yearly with the profit figure of the 2016 financial year reaching approximately US$24,621.9 million. The sales and profits have been achieved through good leadership management. Therefore, the work focuses on how leadership management style of McDonald’s has helped it in improving its business operations.
McDonald’s Corporate Culture
The company adopts a culture of learning. The culture is achieved through the continuous evaluation of employees on whether they meet the set targets to ensure that has the required human resource capabilities. Apart from achieving efficiency among its workers through continuous evaluation, the firm also emphasizes on human resource development by offering training courses to its employees. Other organization’s culture includes people-centricity, diversity and inclusion, organizational learning, and individual learning (Jeon et al. 733). The company promotes organizational learning through its programs, policies, and scheduling meeting with employees to foster sharing of knowledge and quick feedback. Similarly, the strategy encourages diversity and inclusion among its suppliers, customers, franchisees, and workers. To add, the firm focuses on people-centricity through supporting people by engaging managers to help in improving the company’s procedures and processes. Finally, McDonald’s promotes individual learning as a corporate culture to promote their quality, productivity, and business effectiveness.
However, the company has recently failed in maintaining its culture of providing quality products to its customers. There had been several reported claims that the firm offers less nutritious products. The problem arises because the business tries to incorporate various culture in its menu. In certain cases, it becomes a challenge in designing the best product that meets the cultural needs of the local population. One of the reported cases is high-calorie products in its menu. The problem has led to a rise of obesity among its consumers, especially those in the US. The public complains about the issue invited scrutiny of the company’s culture and internal practices since it failed to major on safety issues and nutrition.
How McDonald’s Make Decisions
From personal conversation with one of the company’s top executive, McDonald’s practices autocratic leadership style where team leaders are only willing to make unilateral decisions. A unilateral decision refers to a one-sided decision. The style of leadership exerts pressure on team members bringing a lot of stress to the members. The strategy is considered disadvantageous to the firm. However, McDonald’s finds the environment a fun place to be as the crew members do not complain when ordered by their managers (Hagiu, Andrei and Julian 171). This depicts that autocratic style is effective to stressful employees which has made the strategy effective to McDonald’s. An autocratic strategy has a lot of disadvantages such as low creativity and high workers turnover as employees do not like being commanded by their executive staffs. However, McDonald’s has never been affected by these limitations as it is always easy to find replacements.
Irrespective of how convenient the firm considers autocratic style as its best strategy for leadership, there other better techniques that it should incorporate to curb the high workers turnover due to dictatorship. Also, the leadership style discourages inventions as people as forced to stick to the standard. Therefore, the firm should adopt another style such as democratic or transactional leadership strategy that will give every employee to contribute and create a friendly atmosphere among workers. Better innovation will help the company in setting new strategies in other areas with different cultural beliefs.
McDonald’s Motivating Factors
McDonald’s provides its employees with an environment of self-motivation because its workers are willing to perform individually. I observed that the role of McDonald’s management is to provide the right condition while it is the personal decision of every worker to improve his or her performance. More so, the company considers that if it changes its management strategies and adopts another style other than an autocratic system of governance, then there will be an extreme backlash from the team members who may require more independence (Jin, Myung and Bruce 894). Therefore, the firm cannot afford giving authority to group members. Moreover, the company fosters globalization which proposes standardization for it to be achieved. Similarly, because the company has several food chains globally, it will need to instruct its senior managers to speak the same standards to the employees to retain its stand...