Management Styles, Leadership, and Organizational Culture: Unilever

This assignment analyzes management practices, specifically focusing on Unilever as a case study. The report explores the roles of middle managers, including their responsibilities in human resource management, accounting, R&D, marketing, and manufacturing. It discusses the importance of adapting to dynamic market environments, including changing customer demands and technological advancements. The report examines the interrelation between leadership styles (democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire) and organizational culture within Unilever, emphasizing how these elements influence employee productivity and overall business success. It highlights the importance of middle managers in developing effective organizational culture, fostering employee commitment, and driving performance through market-based and results-based management approaches. The analysis concludes that effective leadership and management styles are critical for maintaining a strong organizational culture and achieving business goals.

Management
Style
(PART-1)

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Role of middle manager..............................................................................................................3
Interrelation of leadership style and organisational culture in Unilever.....................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Management practices can be defined as techniques to improve and enhance productivity of
a company. Design job employment, training procedures, economic incentives, provide
meaningful feedback and more, are such cornerstone of management practices. These would help
in developing tendency of company to gain more profitability and attain high achievements
(Pines and et.al., 2012). The present project is going to make a discussion on different
management style, which are used to resolve a number of situations in a business. For this
purpose, Unilever is taken, which is British transitional company and headquartered in London,
UK. It sells many branded products of consumer goods in more than 190 countries, including
own 400 brands.
To achieve higher competitive advantages, its managers implement various policies to run
business in international market (Brierley and Fryirs, 2013). Here, for enhancing productivity of
business, different role of middle managers and skills require to perform the same are escribed in
this essay. Furthermore, discussion of different leadership style and its link with organisational
culture also made. As the main role of management practices is to achieve higher outcomes in
complex situation. Therefore, range of skills require to accomplish business objectives and
handle situations, a range of managerial skills are also highlighted.

MAIN BODY
Role of middle manager
Middle managers in a company play an important role in managing and performing every
function of business, in best manner. They deal with developing effective goal setting and
concerning on level of decision making of each department, to ensure success of business. The
five typical functions in middle managers are mostly enrolled with are- Human resource
management, Accounting, R&D, Marketing and Manufacturing. Here, to perform each function
in desired way, they provide proper guidance to lower managers how to carry out activities
(Shearer, 2012). They also provide information to each department about what the strategy is and
track progress accordingly. As today in both international and domestic market, competition has
raised continuously therefore, it creates various challenges and risk for organisation to run
activities efficiently. It includes changing demand of customers to get more innovative services,
emergence of new technologies, rise of competition and more. Therefore, to cope up from such
challenges, it is foremost duty of middle managers to line up business as per dynamic
environment. Here, to gain competitive advantages in both market, mostly 75% companies fails,
due to less support of workers (Hickson and Pugh, 2014). In this regard, it is foremost duty of
managers to develop strategies to gain high commitment of employees to perform at their level
of best. For this purpose, they implement various management practices to increase productivity
of workers and develop job satisfaction in them as well. It includes stress and time management,
design training and incentive schemes, create positive environment to adopt changes in business
etc.
Here, to reduce stress and workload pressure, middle managers line up with top
management to introduce more workers in business. Further, they allot different roles and
responsibilities by determining capabilities and abilities of each worker also. This would help in
ensuring that each activity will complete in desired manner (Anjum, Karim and Bibi, 2014).
Along with this, to resolve complex situations like conflicts, resistivity of workers to work with
new techniques, reduce labour turnover and more, middle managers in an organisation adopt
different style of management. For example, conflict resolution can be approached in various
manners like middle manager can make certain decisions either by including participation of
workers or staying them away for the same. Similarly, they can also act as mediator to bring
employees together and develop collaboration among them. Here, each approach used to handle

an adequate number of complex situation, is totally dependent on managerial tactics and
management style of middle managers as well as the employees, whom they are working with.
As there is no one approach fits for dealing with different-different problems. Therefore,
managers need to adopt various management styles by determining how workers will respond to
them (Khakimova, Zhang and Hall, 2012). This would make such managers more effective
leaders and influence employees to follow their strategies as well. In this regard, management
styles can be defined as a method of leadership to resolve an issue and get contribution of
workers in achievement of business goals and objectives successfully (Cerni, Curtis and Colmar,
2014). It includes democratic, autocratic, laiseez-faire management styles where each style has
certain advantage to resolve an issue.
Democratic style leads to include participation of each worker in decision making process,
where they get chance to share views for increasing productivity of business. While autocratic
style is characterised in terms of individuals’ control on decision making process. It typically
takes actions as per business requirements and forced workers to accept changes for higher
achievements. Although this style sounds negative but it helps in making quick decisions for
enhancing profitability of business (Reio and Trudel, 2013). Other than this, Laissez-faire style is
considered as the most delegative style, where every employee is allowed to make decisions to
complete their assign roles in own manner. Thus, to perform different roles and responsibilities,
middle managers adopt a number of management styles. For example, for being a proficient
communicator and influencing each workers towards achievement of common goal, they adopt
democratic style of leadership. While to develop core competencies, it is better to adopt the
concept of autocratic management style (Dupuis, 2014). All these styles help middle manager in
becoming a perfect and effective leader, who can influence employees to give higher
contribution in achievement of business objectives.
Interrelation of leadership style and organisational culture in Unilever
Due to higher presence of competitors both in domestic and global market, business
environment of organisations has become more dynamic (Choi, 2013). It assists companies to
make changes in business, organisational culture, leadership and management styles etc. as per
demand of business. Therefore, to ascertain such changes, middle managers play effective role.
They take responsibilities like development of core competencies, improvement of productivity,
maximise performance potential, facilitating knowledge sharing and more. This would help in

operating and managing functions more appropriately. In context with Unilever, it is considered
as one of the largest consumer products companies in international market, which sales every
brands range from shampoo to washing powder (Dung and Florea, 2012). This company deals in
retail sectors in UK and operates business in more than 60 countries worldwide. In terms of
leadership and management, it is a very well organized company also which give advantage to
gain support of every associated people in running business successfully. Currently, approximate
179,000 workers are working in its organisation and all are much talented to give best services to
customers. Therefore, considering the scope and size of business, it is essential for top and
middle management to operate business in a well-defined and organised framework. For this
purpose, they have implement corporate business structure in order to develop a balance between
organisational flexibility and governance (Boykins and et.al., 2013). Therefore, to inform
workers how they have to work on and give best performances, middle managers collaborate
with top management to develop effective organisational culture.
Organisational Culture can be defined as collection of certain values and norms which are
shared by large number of people and groups, who are associated with an organization. It
controls the ways in which employees within business premises interact with each other as well
as make conversation with company’s stakeholders outside the organisation (Mao and Hale,
2015). In big companies, organisational culture is mostly complex in nature and affected by
various of factors. It includes multi-culture or cross culture environment in business, which
mostly arise when a company operate its business across territorial boundaries. With this regard,
organisational culture of Unilever is derived from cross culture environment due to enrolment of
various workers of other countries within business (Ji, 2012). This culture is mainly emphasized
on enhancing performance both on individual and organisational basis, develop quality of
outputs, efficient work through implementation of latest techniques. As employees belong to
different-different background and have linguistic issues therefore, to influence them to work in
collaboration for achievement of growth and success of business, is really a tough task for
middle managers. For this purpose, they adopt different leadership styles to resolve complexities
of business and influence workers to work as per organisational culture.
Success of business of any company is normally based on the ability of leaders who
influence workers to give to support for developing a culture of high performance and better
quality. Here, middle managers of Unilever use market-based as well as results-based approaches

for managing the business and driving performance of business. In this regard, market-based
management approach takes market based information like new trends, to make changes in
management tactics accordingly. While other than this, results-based management approach
concerns on achievement of higher outcomes in efficient manner. Therefore, these tactics used
by middle managers of Unilever facilitate them in developing workers’ productivity and
enhancing organizational performance in terms of consumer goods business more appropriately.
Henceforth, it has evaluated that leadership and managements styles both links to maintains the
organizational culture of Unilever in best manner.
Leadership approaches mainly reinforces the improvement and development of effective
organizational culture of Unilever. This would affect management practices and organisational
structure as well as develop the corporate culture of performance also. For this purpose, middle
managers develop high leadership quality for monitoring and evaluations the performance in
regular manner. Along with this, it also leads to achieve high commitment and support of
workers for accomplishment of business goals.
CONCLUSION
It has been concluded from this assignment that to enhance productivity of business and
handle each and every situation, a company needs to implement different management practices.
In includes developing effective communication, employment, designing incentive plans,
empowering employees to provide effective customer services, introducing schemes for
improving quality of products and more. These practices help in anticipating every requirement
of business and completing operational procedures more appropriately. For this process, it is
essential to distinguish one corporates culture from other. This would help in designing policies
as per organisational culture and retaining workers for longer period. Along with this, to handle
and deal with complex situations like reducing resistivity of employees to accept changes,
developing competitive strategies, attracting customers towards business and more, middle
managers need to enhance managerial skills for performing such roles.
Since middle managers are the central part of organisation who take entire responsibility to
run business effectively. Therefore, they are accountable to provide every information to top
managers for taking timely decisions to manage business, in adequate manner. They also provide
proper guidance to lower management staff to perform their roles as per business requirement.

Thus, to perform such roles and responsibilities, middle managers concern more on development
of effective managerial skills.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Anjum, M.A., Karim, J. and Bibi, Z., 2014. Relationship of Values and Conflict Management
Styles. IBA Business Review. 9(1).
Boykins, C. and et.al., 2013. An Empirical Study of Leadership Styles. Journal of Economic
Development, Management, IT, Finance & Marketing. 5(2).
Brierley, G.J. and Fryirs, K.A., 2013. Geomorphology and river management: applications of the
river styles framework. John Wiley & Sons.
Cerni, T., Curtis, G.J. and Colmar, S.H., 2014. Cognitive‐experiential leadership model: How
leaders’ information‐processing systems can influence leadership styles, influencing
tactics, conflict management, and organizational outcomes. Journal of Leadership
Studies. 8(3). pp.26-39.
Choi, Y., 2013. The influence of conflict management culture on job satisfaction. Social
Behavior and Personality: an international journal. 41(4). pp.687-692.
Dung, P.Q. and Florea, A.M., 2012, June. A literature-based method to automatically detect
learning styles in learning management systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd
International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (p. 46). ACM.
Dupuis, J.P., 2014. New approaches in cross-cultural management research: The importance of
context and meaning in the perception of management styles. International Journal of
Cross Cultural Management. 14(1). pp.67-84.
Gonçalves, G. and et.al., 2016. Cultural intelligence and conflict management
styles. International Journal of Organizational Analysis. 24(4). pp.725-742.
Hickson, D.J. and Pugh, D.S., 2014. Management Worldwide: Distinctive Styles Among
Globalization. Penguin UK.
Ji, J., 2012. Chinese people's self-construal and its relationship with conflict management
styles. Public Personnel Management. 41(5). pp.69-78.