Unilever Leadership Models and Styles

The assignment report delves into the various leadership models and styles employed by Unilever, a multinational organization. It examines situational, system, and contingency leadership approaches used within the company, providing insights into how these models facilitate effective management and decision-making. The report cites relevant studies and research in operations management, finance, and risk management to support its findings.

MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONS

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
P1) Roles and characteristics of a leader and a manager. .........................................................3
P2) Role of a leader and manager in different situational ..........................................................6
Contexts.......................................................................................................................................6
P3) Different theories and models of approach,..........................................................................8
P4) Key approaches to operations management.(content is covered in the PPT).......................9
P5) Importance and value of operations management.(content is covered in the PPT).............9
P6) Factors that impact operational management.......................................................................9
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................11
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

INTRODUCTION
Management and operations is related with development and controlling the production process
in the organisation in respect of goods and services. It involves optimum utilization of the
resources that are required for effective and efficient operations of the business. Operations
management is related with planning, managing and controlling the process of production of
goods and services. The objective of managing the operations is to maximise the profits through
effective management of efforts of staff. Operations manager is responsible for meeting the
needs of clients.
Unilever is a company that deals in consumer goods. It belongs to consumer goods industry. It
was founded in 2nd September 1929. The company is headquartered in London, U.K. It deals in
various types of products such as personal care, food and beverage etc.
The Report will describe will define role of leader and manager in different situations, various
methods of operations management, factors inside the organization that impact the management
of operations and the process of decision making by leader and manager.
MAIN BODY
P1) Roles and characteristics of a leader and a manager.
Leader: A good leadership is the path where leader can interact socially and appreciate the
efforts of others in reaching towards the goal of the organization. It is the responsibility of a
leader to inspire and motivate the team to achieve the common goal.
Manager: The management in the department is done by manager and escort the people who are
working under them. Managers must be able to do planning, organizing, leading, co-ordinating
and controlling (Shalley, 2017).
Roles Characteristics
Leaders Envisioning: This is the
important role of a leader
which help them to envision
the organization in the future.
It requires imagination,
therefore leader must be
Enthusiastic: Leaders follow
70/30 principle, which
includes 70% of their time
cultivating relationships and
30% time to get to know
employees. Unilever's new

imaginative and intuitive.
Unilever vision statements is
adding passion to life by
achieving everyday nutrition,
hygiene and personal care by
helping people. Under Paul
Polman leadership Unilever
since 2009 has an ambitious
vision helps in increasing
positive social impact through
the Unilever Sustainability
Living Plan(Babich, 2018).
CEO Alan Jope likes
challenges and committed
towards the hard work of their
people and have an impressive
track record of delivering
consistent high-quality
performance.
Aligning people with the
vision: the vision of leader
must be followed by its people
by sharing and involving them
in the vision. Leader can create
influence by its skills and
ethical values. Unilever
protects their people, assets
and reputation by giving
strong values and clear
policies and standards to
ensure their employees do the
right things and aim to create
positive influence across value
chain and focus on business
integrity.
Delegation and trust: The
leaders have quality to
delegate great people. They
know how to delegate and
surround themselves with the
great people. The hire the best
and trust their teams with
execution of activities.
Unilever focus on business
integrity that helps them to
attract, retain and engage the
best employees and better able
to choose the right suppliers
and partners.
Ensuring Execution: It is the
essential task of any
Excellent communicators:
Leaders are good in

leadership. To achieve the
vision and mission, the task,
activities and targets must be
carried out with the help of
their employees within the
given time frame. Then
employees can follow various
strategies to complete that
tasks.
communicating their
viewpoints and vision to the
team members and people
outside the organization. They
motivate and inspires the
employees with their speech
and effectively communicate
with the society when the
company is going through
crisis.
Managers Selecting and hiring
employees: It is the
responsibility of the manager
to hire and select the qualified
employees for open positions
working human resource
department. Unilever engages
the best employees with the
help of their business integrity.
Organizational skills: effective
managers ensures that the
specific tasks and activities get
done within the given time
framework by organizing the
teams on the right track and
working towards the vision.
Unilever management system
works together to get out what
is the best for people in terms
of goods and services they are
providing.
Overseeing operation:
Managers have responsibility
check out the operation like,
quality control, payroll, project
management etc. they have
responsibility to create and
plan schedules, assign
activities and set time frame to
Confidence and decision
making: For an manager to be
effective, manager must be
confident in its abilities,
experience and decisions.
Unilever's operating model is
designed so well that they
deliver faster decisions.

complete that tasks.
P2) Role of a leader and manager in different situational contexts.
Situational context Leader Manager
1. Conflict The workplace can become a
destructive environment when
leaders allow conflict run
through the organization.
Unilever's leaders act as
responsible and prevent
conflicts that helps the
employees to concentrate on
their work. Their leadership
ensures that the roles and
responsibilities is clearly
passed on to every employees.
To reduce conflict in the
workplace, leader must have
good influencing power so that
they can attract more followers
with his words and confront
the tension within the
organization and work towards
the vision by motivating and
increasing the productivity.
Conflict is an unavoidable part
of the workplace. The most of
the conflicts are comes from
strained relationships between
the employees and executives.
Therefore the manager
responsibility will be to
communicate effectively, give
respect and importance to
every employees which can
help in preventing major
conflicts. Unilever's
management system have a
good relationship with the
employees as they follow their
values and policies to protect
their people assets, reputation
and relationship. Their
business integrity brings
values to the life of their
employees.
2 Miscommunication For a leader to be
communicating effectively
they must ensure there is no
chance of miscommunication.
For a manager to lead the team
they must focus their
communication on the roles of
employees and motivate them

The leaders of Unilever such
as CEO Alan Jope has a great
communication skills and
influencing power which
helped their followers to
achieve the vision for the
future. The appointment of
Jope increases profitability by
putting a division called
Prestige.
to understand the ambitions to
meet the activities assign to
them by proper planning and
scheduling. Unilever's
managers communicate clearly
to employees and clearly pass
roles and responsibilities to
each and every employees.
3. Labour turnover The leaders responsibility to
maintain quality of
communication between
employees and the
management team which can
influence labour turnover.
Employees must feel respected
by their executive and have a
role in decision making
process. Unilever is focusing
on health of employees
physically and mentally.
It is the duty of manager to
ensure the employees turnover
and productivity are utilized
properly. Turnover allows
flexibility and to restructure
departments and functions.
Unilever are aware about the
efforts of their employees and
by giving them a good salary
and increment it keeps them
motivated and satisfied with
their work and hence increases
productivity.
P3) Different theories and models of approach,
The different theories and models of approach are situational leadership, system leadership, and
contingency leadership.
11 Situational leadership: in 1970s Hershey and Blanchard founded this concept of
situational leadership. In this they explained about the effectiveness of leadership style
depending upon the situation(Khanna, 201). The maturity level of employees and their

attitude are determinative for the situation. Therefore, they divided this model into four
levels of maturity that can be placed into situational leadership:
 Directing: At this level, the leaders have to deal with the employees who have low
competence and unmotivated. The task completion gets difficult when new or
inexperienced employees are unable to carry out tasks independently. Unilever's level of
maturity is not like this, they always hire the best employees which can carry out their
tasks efficiently(Choi, 2017).
 Coaching: At level of maturity, employees are desire to work enthusiastically but cannot
perform this independently because of lack of skills and knowledge. Therefore leaders
guide them to complete the tasks and convince them to complete the tasks and motivates
to do it.
 Supporting: At this level the employees are capable but have low motivation therefore
leader supports them in their work and convince them to work independently again.
 Delegating: At this level the employees have high competence and high motivation and
need less support by the leader, Unilever have this delegation in their organization where
employees have capability to work enthusiastically and independently(Ivanov, 2017).
2. System leadership: This approach was developed by Dr Ian Macdonald and was an
organisational behaviour expert that helps the leader in an organization to give orders to
the all employees do that they can do their work productively depending on their
potential. This approach uses principles of good leadership, system designs and social
process. It provides tools to the leaders to analyse the human behaviour and helps in the
achievement of organization main goal. Unilever CEO committed to the hard work so its
employees and always give their best to increase the productivity and complete the tasks
given by executives within the given time framework.
3. Contingency leadership: This theory was developed by Fiedler which states the
effectiveness and contingency of leader depending upon the leadership style is matching
to the situation. Therefore, leader must find out about the leadership style to which fits
with the situations. This theory includes people oriented and task oriented, in people
oriented, leader having good personal skill and depends on relationship with others to
achieve task. In task oriented, leaders focus on the task and accomplishes goals. Unilever

follow both people and task oriented which helps them complete their task within time
and helps in moving towards their vision and achievements(Ravindran, 2016).
P4) Key approaches to operations management.(content is covered in the PPT)
P5) Importance and value of operations management.(content is covered in the PPT)
P6) Factors that impact operational management.
Factors within the environment of the
business that affects the operational
management are as follows-
Organisational culture- Organization
culture consist of values, beliefs etc. that
forms the psychological as well as social
environment of the business.
The operational manager of Unilever must
have an understanding of different cultural
values that impacts the implementation of
various approaches of operational
management such as Total Quality
Management etc. Appropriate environment
and culture of Unilever plays an important
role in proper implementation of various
approaches of operational management.
Effective management and implementation
of operational management approaches and
for this, there must be commitment of top
level management for continuous
improvement in the process and promoting
the cooperation and coordination among
employees that belongs to diverse
cultures(Schwarz, 2015).
Change in culture is a method of changing
the culture of Unilever to meet out the
demand of customers. Organisational culture
of Unilever helps in proper planning and
controlling of operational management
strategies.
Corporate social responsibility-
Corporate social responsibility is also called
corporate sustainability it is a model that
helps the organisation to remain accountable
towards various stakeholders such as
investors, customers, government etc.
Corporate social responsibility has an
impact on economy, environment and
society. Through different social
responsibility programmes company
provides various benefits to the society. It
helps in improving the morale of employees
as well as of employers(Slack, 2018).
It is the responsibility of operations manager
to improve the performance of Unilever in

respect of environment. Operations
managers must take steps for resolving the
issues related with responsibilities towards
environment that may impact the approaches
of managing the operations like total quality
management, six sigma etc. Decisions
related with operations management also
affects the decisions related with proper
utilization of raw material for producing
goods and services of Unilever. Technology
of producing goods may be helpful for
operations but it may negatively affects the
environment. Such issues related with
corporate social responsibility must be
resolved through rules and
regulations(Stadtler, 2015).
Sustainability-
A sustainable business is a business that
have lower negative impact on local as well
as global level environment, society etc.
Business will incorporate the sustainability
principles in every type of the decisions of
the business.
Sustainability is an important issue in
Unilever and the importance of practises and
strategies of sustainability is also increasing
day by day. Issues of sustainability may
impact the operational management. It also
affects the various decisions of Unilever
related with strategy, planning of operations.
Example- Unilever should have proper
objectives for improving environmental
performance of the company and this must
be integrated with the cost and quality of
performance. Sustainable business will
ensure that the products, process, all the
other activities will help in considering the
issues related with environment to meet out
current as well as future needs.
Sustainability will help Unilever for creating
the value for its customers, environment etc.
Ethics-
Ethics refers to rights of peoples, concern
towards safety and health. Ethics helps in
analysing the day to day problems that are
happening in the organisation during
performing the operations. Operations
manager plays an important role in making
efficient utilization of resources of Unilever.
There are various types of ethical issues that
an operational manager has to face such as
issues related with the safety of workers,
safety and quality of products, hiring and
dissmisal of employees and rights of
employees(Uhl, 2016).

CONCLUSION
From the above study it has been summarised that roles and characteristics of leader and
manager helped the Unilever organization in terms of productivity and profitability. This report
highlights qualities of leaders which helped the organization in motivating and inspiring the
employees and influence them to work towards the organizational vision or goals whereas
managers helped in planning, organizing, co-ordinating, leading and controlling the staff. This
report shows the different situational context such as conflict, miscommunication and labour
turnover which then compared with Unilever's organisation workplace This report shows the
brief about different model of approaches which is used by Unilever organization such as
situational, system and contingency leadership. With the help of this approaches Unilever's
leadership models and styles within the organization was explained very well.
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