Leadership, Management, and Operation Strategies for M&S Ltd

This report examines the roles and characteristics of leaders and managers, exploring their responsibilities in different situational contexts, particularly within the context of M&S Ltd. It delves into various leadership styles such as situational, system, and contingency leadership, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses in the work environment. The report also covers key approaches to operation management, including its importance in achieving business objectives and the application of operation management principles. Furthermore, it addresses the factors impacting operation management and decision-making within the business environment, providing a comprehensive overview of leadership, management, and operational strategies. The report uses M&S Ltd as a case study to illustrate these concepts.

MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................1
P1 Different roles and characteristics of a leader and a manager...........................................1
P2 Role of a leader and a manager in different situational context .......................................2
P3 Different type of theories and modes of approaches of leadership...................................4
M2 Strength and weaknesses of different approaches to situations within the work
environment............................................................................................................................6
TASK 2............................................................................................................................................6
P4 key approaches to operation management........................................................................6
P5 Importance and value of operation management achieving the business objective..........7
D2 Application of operation management and factors that impact on the business environment
................................................................................................................................................8
P6 and M4 Factors in the business that impact on operation management and decision making
................................................................................................................................................9
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

Illustration Index
Illustration 1: situational leadership.................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION
The leader and manager has the responsibility to manage the employees in the company.
M&S Ltd is the British multinational company in UK. They provide the food products and also
sell clothing in the market. It is the biggest retailer in the world. The operation management
strategies help us to achieve the desired goal. This report includes roles and responsibilities of a
leader and a manager, leadership styles, operation management strategies etc. All these strategies
of the directorship will help to achieve the objective in the company. Employee relation is also
important to maintain the brand recognition in the market to enhance the company performance.
TASK 1
P1 Different roles and characteristics of a leader and a manager
A Leader is most important in the company because they have responsibilities to support
the employees and provide appropriate guidelines to employee for work together. They provide
instructions to team members to work together. It provides efficient and effective environment to
workers to work together. The roles and characteristics of a leader in the M&S Ltd as follows:
1. Required at all levels: They need to work at all levels in the organization. In the top-
level management, they need to provide policies and plans to the manager. In lower and
middle level management, they need to interpret and execute plans and appropriate
policies in company (Almansour, 2012).
2. Representation of the firm: Manager manage meetings, conferences, seminars etc. they
have the role in which they need to communicate rational of organization to outside
public.
3. Solicits support: Leader is a person who has the ability to provide the support and
cooperation of the subordinates in the organization.
The manager is the person who has the ability to administrate, control the organization
efficiently. They provide guidelines to the groups and staff to manage and handle a work in the
firm. The role and the characteristics of the manager in M&S Ltd as follows:
1. Team development: The responsibilities of the manger of this firm is to create the
efficient and the effective team that can be easily achieve the desired objective. They
need to create innovative group that can get the higher performance of the entity.
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2. Manage resources: manager of the company need to manage the resources depends on
the employee needs. If worker needs the resources in the entity then they need to manage
the resources effectively.
3. Process and quality: They see the all workflow of the processes and the quality. They
should improve the quality of the product and also increase the processes in the firm to
get the desired goal (Clarke, 2013).
Comparison between the leader and a manager:
Table 1: Comparison between leaders and managers
S.
No.
Leader Manager
1 Leader of the firm create changes. Manager reacts to appropriate changes.
2 Leaders implement the idea in an
entity.
Manager has a good ideas to increase the
performance of the company.,
3 Leaders taker the responsibilities for
the work.
Managers take a direct credit for the implemented
work.
4 They create a team for work
together.
Manager directs groups.
5 They develop power with people. They exercise power over people.
6 They create the shared focus for their
work.
They already focused with their work.
P2 Role of a leader and a manager in different situational context
The situational context is that in which the firm has the critical situation and they are not
able to find the solution for the problem. Sometimes companies have the situation in which they
are not capable to find appropriate solutions for the company profits. This context influences the
different types of the communications in the firm (D. Waters, 2013). The leader and the manager
needs to manage and handle effectively. Context is the situation in which an event occurs. This
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context affects the overall firm’s performance such as place, activity, environment etc. These all
are the different parameters that affect the firm performance.
The situational context of M&S Ltd is they face the problem in which they are not able to
get more profit as compared to previous year. There are many factors of this problem such as
lack of direction, employee relation is not well managed, environment is not appropriate for the
workers etc. so that manager and leader need to manage this situation. They have the
responsibilities to manage the employees work in the company (Tyssen, Wald and Spieth, P.,
2013).
They need to manage their team member by providing additional services to the
employee to achieve the desired goal of the firm. M&S Ltd provides the clothing and luxury
food products to the customers. This has 959 stores in the UK. The quality of the products and
the services is very good. They are not able to complete the objective of this year (Du and et.al.,
2013). So, they need to apply some strategies to solve the problem. Roles and responsibilities of
leader to handle the situational context:
Provide appropriate environment: They need to provide efficient environment to the
employees for work. The leader need to provide effective guide lines to produce the product. The
leader need to give open environment to the employees that they also can give their opinion and
the suggestions to leader. So that they can find good solutions for the problem.
Efficient resources: They need to provide advanced resources so that they can easily
produce innovative product to the customers.
Support: The leader should give the support for the work. They should be good enough
to give support and provide efficient guidelines to the employees (Ellyson and et.al., 2012,).
The role and responsibilities of the manager in situational context:
Provide guidelines: In this type of situational context they need to manage and handle the
situation to provide effective guidelines for the problem. They must give the guidelines such as
how to do effective production, how to maintain the brand recognition, how to increase the sell
in the market. They should apply the pricing and promotion strategies to increase the sell in the
market effectively.
Improve the selling process: Manager needs to give appropriate strategies for pricing and
the promotion. This firm is not able to get the desired goal so that the company manager needs to
apply some strategies to sell more products in the market to increase the performance and to
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achieve the desired goal. The manager has the responsibilities to enhance the company
performance and how to get the objective of the firm (Giltinane, 2013).
P3 Different type of theories and modes of approaches of leadership
Leadership is the way to overcome the problems in the company. They provide the
efficient way to solve the appropriate problem. This firm has the context in which they are not
able to get the desired goal. The target to sell the products and the services is not matching the
target that is decided by the manager of the company. There are many styles of directorship such
as situational, system and contingency leaderships. Each have the different parameters to
overcome the problem. The leadership styles and the models help to achieve the goal and provide
efficient way to solve the problem.
1. Situational leadership
In this type of leadership style, the leader and the manager needs to change and fit with
the development in the company. It is up to the leader how they change their style with the
employees to achieve desired goal. This leadership has mainly two types of approaches that is
described below:
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Telling and directing: The leader needs to follow the top down approach in the firm.
They take the decisions for the employees how to the work to get the target in the market. It
directs the employees to get the objective (Gunasekaran and Ngai, 2012).
Selling and coaching: in this type of theory the leader provides the guideline to the
inexperienced employee to improve the performance of the company in the market because they
are new in the firm and they do not know how to work. They provide the pricing and promotion
strategies to the employee to increase the productivity and then firm can easily get the desired
target.
2. System leadership
In this type of approach, they take an entire system to handle the fundamental issues of
the company. This firm has the issue of that in which they are not getting appropriate target. This
strategy finds the issues in each department and find the appropriate solutions. The manager of
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Illustration 1: Types of situational leadership
Source: situational leadership

this company need to find the problems such as what are the employee needed for the
production, how many resources needed to increase the production etc (Wang and et.al., 2013).
3. Contingency leadership
This type of leadership theory finds the best way to solve the appropriate problem. They
consternate on both the factors one is leader's personality and other one is the situation. Fielder
and his associates studied leaders in a different type of the contexts but mostly in the subject
context and their model is only based on the appropriate research findings. They find what are all
the problems that the employees are facing, what are the strategies should apply to increase the
productivity to get the target. This leadership styles consists three types of factors as follows:
Leader member relations: It deals with the general environment of the groups and the
feeling such as loyalty, confidence, trust that the team has for their leader. They identify the
employees' relation between the team members and the team leader (Heizer, 2016).
Task structure: It is related to the task clarity and they identify that the task manipulation
is correct or not.
The position power: It is related to the pay-off punishment authority leader has over the
members of the team.
M2 Strength and weaknesses of different approaches to situations within the work environment
All approaches have the different characteristics and the strength. The leadership styles
have the many strength and the weaknesses. Strength of the situational, contingency leadership is
this improves the productivity of the product in the market, make better decision, increase
employment relationships etc. weaknesses is employee burn out, assumption of encouragement,
sometime risky etc. these weaknesses affect the overall company performance and also decrease
the productivity in the market.
TASK 2
P4 key approaches to operation management
Operation management is the important area in handling and managing the firm
effectively. This is mainly related to the production and design department because it checks the
process and the quality of the product in the company. The main feature of the operation
management is that in which it converts the inputs in the output in the form of products and the
services. The manager of the company takes the decisions for increase the productivity and the
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performance of the firm (Kim, Kumar and Kumar, 2012). They need to take many types of
decisions in the organization such as product design, process design, management, quality
management etc. they need to take decision based on the customer needs. Some of the key
approaches that is used by M&S Ltd as follows:
1. Six sigmas: In this type of approach they only focus on the quality. This firm have the
issue of the productivity of the product is not reaching with the target. This is the set of
tools and techniques to improve the product productivity and the product quality. The
firm has the target to sell the product to get the desired goal. This firm provides the
clothing, foods etc. to the customers (Seuring, and Gold, 2013). In the production
department may be there is some issue they are not providing the good quality of food
and cloth so that customer not buying the product and then it directly affects the company
performance. By applying this approach organization can easily get the higher
performance and also achieve the target.
2. Business process engineering (BPR): This type of approach focuses on the design and
analysis of the workflow and business processes in the company. Main objective of this
strategy to help the firm to how they can do their work in the dramatically way so that
they can increase the productivity and also get the target. This firm used this approach to
reduce the problem and the productivity of the product and the services to get the desired
target (Lian and Tui, 2012.).
3. Lean enterprise: This strategy focuses on the quantity creation for the end client with
minimal waste and the processes. This includes various factors such as quantity, quantity
stream, flow of production, perfection etc.
The leader and the manager needs to identify the problems in the production department
and then the leader needs to provide the effective and efficient guideline to the employees to get
the target. The manager role is to provide the guideline such as how to increase the productivity,
appropriate strategies to increase the performance, pricing and promotion strategies etc. these all
are the roles and the responsibilities of the leader and the manager to get the desired target.
P5 Importance and value of operation management achieving the business objective
The operation management helps in achieving the business goals by applying different
types of approaches in the company. This management includes all the factors and information
that is to be needed to get the desired objective. They include the factors such as quality of the
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product, quantity, processes, performance etc. theses all are the key factors that will help to get
the desired goal (Manville, and et.al., 2012). Manager has the responsibilities to identify the
product quality that will help to get the target. By identifying these factors, the firm can easily
find the appropriate solutions.
First step of operation management is to identify the current product condition in which
they include quality, processes, workflow etc. there are many types of strategies to get the
business objective.
The main objective of this operation management is that in which they help to identify
and improve the quality of the product. Based on the customer needs company should re produce
the product and services to the clients. The way of managing the workflow that will help to
achieve the desired goal. The M&S Ltd follows the various types of approaches to get the goal.
This firm uses the operation management strategies such as six sigma’s and BPR etc. this kind of
approaches focus on the quality and the workflow of the product. It identifies the what are the
quality of the product, what are the features that the product should have etc. based on that
information the manager can easily get the issues and the manager can solve effectively
(McCleskey, 2014). This have much importance such as it improves the quality of the product, it
enhances the performance, it also increases the selling process in the market.
D2 Application of operation management and factors that impact on the business environment
Operation management help to improve the quality of the product and also increase the
performance of the firm. By knowing the actual condition of the firm, they can easily modify it
by applying some operational strategies to get the desired goal. M&S Ltd company applies the
operational management in the firm of remove the context and increase the performance of the
firm in the market. Some of the advantages of operational management is as follows:
 Improve productivity: This firm has the issue in which they are not getting the target of
the productivity. So, this will help to improve the productivity and increase the
performance.
 Improves ability to meet the client needs
 High goodwill
 High performance
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Operation management has the disadvantage such as time consuming, sometimes the
employees cannot find the appropriate issues etc. the way of analysing and creating the plan for
improving is very effectively (Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy, 2014).
P6 and M4 Factors in the business that impact on operation management and decision making
There are two types of factors that is affect in business. One is internal and the other one
is external. The decision-making process is not the simple procedure because each decision is
taking by the manager. M&S Ltd firm has the manager who has the ability to take the
appropriate decision to improve the productivity and enhance the performance of the entity in the
world. They provide the cloth and the luxury food to the customers. This entity has the higher
growth in the world. The strength of the firm is structure of the firm is well managed by the
manager that will help to grow in the market (Pierro and et.al., 2013).
There are many factors that impact on the operation management and decision making. In
this firm manager and the team leader follows the top down approaches to take decisions. They
take the opinions from each employee and then they create an appropriate solution to the
company. Firm manager involves the employees in decision making this is the positive impact
on the business and this will maintain the employee relation (Sethuraman and Suresh, 2014).
There are many factors that impact on operation management and decision making as follows:
 Setting up a system
 Creating the best alternatives
 Checking the decisions
 Employee relationship
 External environment
 Ethical
 Sustainability
These all are the factors that will affect the company performance and the productivity of
the firm. To improve the M&S Ltd firm performance they need to manage the employees
relationships and increase the productivity in the market.
CONCLUSION
Operation management help in administrating different processes of the work so that
entity can perform in its full competency and efficiency. This management help us to identify the
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