Management Policies and Leadership Style

Assessment 2

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
ASSESSMENT 2.............................................................................................................................1
1) History of company............................................................................................................1
2) Management policies, leadership style and various strategies for development of people1
3) Strategies and policies which are implemented to achieved stakeholders interests...........3
4) Recommendations for improvement..................................................................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Leadership style and management polices are an essential part of every organisation,
companies show various leadership style and management policies in order to achieve its
organisational goal (Breugelmans and Campo, 2016.). Leadership style is type of style which is
used by a leader to motivate his team and help them to achieve their organisational goal along
with their individual goal. This report contains the various leadership style used by a UK retailer
in order to meet stakeholders interest. It also contains the various management policies and
practices used in an organisation, and use of various management theories to develop strategies
to survive in a changing environment. To understand the various types of leadership style and
management policies a retail business Morrisons PLC is used in this report.
ASSESSMENT 2
1) History of company
Morrisons PLC is a UK based fourth largest retailer headquartered in Bradford West
Yorkshire, England. It was founded by William Morrisons in 1899 as an egg and butter stall in
Rawson Market. It began its expansion in 1952 when Ken Morrison took charge of company, it
opened a small shop in city centre, which was the first self service shop. Morrison became a
public limited company, and listed itself on London Stock Exchange in 1967. It started its
acquisition in 2004 by acquiring Safeway, a British supermarket chain at that time which owned
479 stores, giving Morrisons a large presence in southern part of England. The selected company
deals in a supermarket which provides various products such as groceries, fresh meat, vegetables,
fruits and various other households product. In the year 2016 company owned approx 498 super
stores spread all over England, Scotland and Wales. It provide fresh and quality food through
their own manufacturing facilities in England with the help of its highly committed, trained and
skilled professionals. It also started their online store which meets requirements of approx 11
million customers, to remain ad survive in this competitive environment they offer product at
low price which helps customer to save their money everyday.
2) Management policies, leadership style and various strategies for development of people
Vision statement: Vision statement is a road map designed by a company which shows
that what company wants to become by new transformational initiatives, in order to achieve its
vision statement company sets a defined direction for its growth (Nisbet and Shucksmith, 2017).
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Vision statement of Morrisons is to be the 'food specialist for everyone' in order to achieve its
vision statement and be the food specialist they differentiated themselves from its major
competitors by establishing its own manufacturing and packing facilities, specialist in every area
like butchers, bakers and fishmongers.
Leadership: It is an ability of company's management which helps them to achieve
various challenging tasks and take crucial actions for the benefits of a firm and outperform its
competitors (Takeuchi, Chen and Cheung, 2012.). Persons who have a strong leadership style
can reach to a top level of management and can become the CEO, CFO, President, COO and
chairman of a company.
 Democratic leadership style: Democratic leadership style is considered as a commonly
effective type of style it is a style of leadership where decisions taken by a leader are on
the basis of contribution of every team member regarding a problem. In this type of
leadership style every individual in a team gets an opportunity to add some valuable point
in decision making process.
 Strategic leadership style: This leadership style is followed by a leaders who act as an
intersection between company's growth opportunities and main operations. Strategic
leader evaluate all executive burden in order to maintain a stability in current working
conditions.
 Transactional leadership style: This is considered as a commonly used type of
leadership in which a leader help its team to establish responsibilities and role for each
employees (Hill, Jones and Schilling, 2014). This type of style uses incentive programs in
order to motivate his employees and team members to achieve organisational goal along
with their individual goal.
In the case of Morrisons it uses two different type of leadership style in order to achieve
their market stability it uses strategic leadership style and transactional leadership style and later
changed their leadership style to Democratic style of leadership.
Management: Management is an activity of setting a strategy for an organisation and its
employees to coordinate their efforts for the accomplishment of organisational goal along with
their individual goal. It includes various sets of function which include organising, planning,
staffing, controlling and directing. Management practices are various methods or techniques used
by an organisation to achieve its goal. Following are some types of management practices:
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 Responsibility division: In this type of management policies directors assign
responsibilities and roles to various employees who are engaged in different operation of
a company (Kara and et.al. 2013.). This types of policies help organisation to remove the
duplication of work as they assign different roles and responsibilities to every employee.
 Employee engagement: in this type of policy managers formulates various strategies to
keep its employee engaged in company to increase the performance of organisation. It is
a approach which I used by companies to increase its employee retention and reduce its
employee turnover ratio.
Morrisons failed to retain its employees after its merge with Safeway stores which
resulted in decrease of profit and sales for the company but later it realised that it is very
important for company to retain its employee so they changed their policy to employee
engagement policy.
Development of people: It is a process used by companies in which they send their
employee under certain training session to enhance and develop new skills in them. This is
considered a very important part for any organisation to develop new skills in their employees in
order to improve their efficiency in work.
 Training programs: This is a program which is used by companies to provide
knowledge about company's work to newly recruited employees and for those who does
not perform well (Greenstein. 2012). This is a program used by companies to improve
their employees efficiency in order to achieve the organisational goal.
 Team work: It consists of efforts made by a group of people working together to
complete assigned tasks in an efficient as well as effective manner. Showing team work
to complete a work shows a development in people to work together and achieve its
organisational goal.
3) Strategies and policies which are implemented to achieved stakeholders interests
In order to meet its vision statement and achieve stakeholders interests company uses
various management strategies and leadership style to lead its employees to achieve its
organisational goal and development of its staff. The leadership style which was used by
Morrison was an opportunist style of leadership, as it continued to exploit and seek new
opportunists in order to meet its vision statement and develop new advance large stores in
different good locations in UK and part of the world. Leadership style was considered to be
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aggressive as when companies finance director, visited a Safeway store during acquisition said
that this was an acquisition not merger which showed it aggressive style of leadership. This
leadership style was also considered as overconfident, as it was very overconfident of their
abilities due to which company started losing its staff, it almost lost all of the staff of Safeway
store (Noe and et.al. 2017). After they lost its maximum staff they shifted their leadership style
from aggressive and overconfident to goal oriented which helped it to get close to its various
other sources more than their competitors could to meet its vision statement and become the food
specialist fro everyone in UK.
In order to remain in the competition in rapidly changing environment company has used
various strategies such as to be more competitive, which means to deliver their services to
maximum number of customer helping them to save their money for future by saving money on
everyday item. Company uses their expert shopkeepers and food makers to provides good quality
food to its customer at the lowest and best possible price. They also implemented new strategies
to develop useful and popular services by offering their customer a stop shop which provides all
products and goods of their daily uses at an affordable price. They also used various strategies
such as making their core supermarkets strong, simplify and speed up their delivery services by
building up a teamwork between their employees, find local solutions to deliver the benefits to
communities and sever their customer in a better way. In order to do so company take feedbacks
from their customers and make changes in business as per the needs of their customers which
increases their customer loyalty. They try to find local solutions which are beneficial for every
store's community. They try to satisfy the need of every local customer in order to get a
meaningful results on a national level. They provide every service and products to its customers
which may include to creating a filter lane at petrol station to help the nearby traffic flow to
stocking of foods which are locally produced. With the changes in their strategies they
implement the suggestions given by their customers to refresh their stores.
In order to survive and compete with UK's big retailers Morrisons changed their
management practices by increasing the rate of employment for women, they have increased the
number of women employees in their leadership team from one to eight (Morrisons Ltd. 2019).
Company has changes their management system by appointing 15 new regional mangers which
provide their expert knowledge in directing approx 490 supermarkets. It also include former Aldi
employee Vicki Reay as their new Operations Director for South East region to become the first
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female region 's store direct at Morrisons. They also employed John McAlpine as their
Operations director for their North region. These two region director will report to Gary Mills,
the Retail Director of Morrisons group along side two operations directors Miles Foster and
Darren Hunter (Morrisons Ltd. 2019). Below them a team, mixture of various professionals and
home grown talent will be working as Regional Mangers. At this level the number of female
employees have grown to seven from one. They also employed the former Regional and Strategy
Director of Asda, David Lepley to join Morrisons Store management team. After the
appointment of new team on every level of management, Group People Director of Morrisons
Clare Grainger said that they have employed the most talented retail team with an objective of
making their strategies true of making core supermarkets strong again. They also employed more
female representative on their retail management team in order to achieve shareholder's interest.
4) Recommendations for improvement
From the analysis of above report it is recommended that company should implement a
concept of virtual self services stores for its daily products. Virtual stores are employee less
stores stores are operated through scanners and CCTV security cameras, these stores will use an
application installed on the phones of customers to unlock the door of stores, customer will take
product and will they leave form stores money will be directly debited from their linked
accounts. This automation can help both company and customers, for company it will help to
reduce the cost of product due to saving in workforce required to manages these stores and for
customers is beneficial that they do not need to carry cash they can go cash less shopping as
money will be directly debited from their accounts. In order to bring these changes company has
to invest and secure their system from cyber crimes as personal details of every customer is
involved. It can also be recommended that in order to improve its efficiency company can switch
to strategic leadership style which will help company to define its organisational goal at every
level of management including the workers working in the lower level of organisation which
will, this change in the leadership style will help its employee to identify organisational goal
along with their individual goal.
CONCLUSION
From the above assessment it can be concluded that an appropriate leadership style,
management theories and strategies are necessary for a company to survive in this competitive
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environment. Selection of inappropriate theory can lead to huge losses for a company. As the
above assessment includes various factor which affected company's health and change in
management system implemented by a company to over those barriers and become the leading
retail store in UK. It also focuses on various strategies which are implemented and reason for
their growth as they always put customer first and then profit.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Noe, R. A., and et.al., 2017. Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage.
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Greenstein, F. I., 2012. The presidential difference: Leadership style from FDR to Barack
Obama. Princeton University Press.
Kara, D., and et.al., 2013. The effects of leadership style on employee well-being in
hospitality. International Journal of Hospitality Management. 34. pp.9-18.
Hill, C. W., Jones, G. R. and Schilling, M. A., 2014. Strategic management: Theory & cases: An
integrated approach. Cengage Learning.
Takeuchi, R., Chen, Z. and Cheung, S. Y., 2012. Applying uncertainty management theory to
employee voice behavior: An integrative investigation. Personnel Psychology. 65(2).
pp.283-323.
Nisbet, J. and Shucksmith, J., 2017. Learning strategies. Routledge.
Breugelmans, E. and Campo, K., 2016. Cross-channel effects of price promotions: An empirical
analysis of the multi-channel grocery retail sector. Journal of Retailing. 92(3). pp.333-
351.
Online
Morrisons Ltd. 2019. [Online]. Available though <https://www.morrisonscorporate.com/about-
us/strategy/>.
Morrisons Ltd. 2019. [Online]. Available though <https://www.morrisonscorporate.com/media-
centre/corporate-news/morrisonsannounces-new-retail-leadership/>.
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