Question:
Discuss about the Strategic Leadership And Issues.
The development of leadership is a significant issue in the contemporary business world. The strategic leadership is an essential component which can shape the organization along with having a major impact on the development of the organization and the employee engagement. Within the rapid changing era of globalization, the leadership has reshaped the fundamental notions as well. The idea of leadership is infused within the society, however, within the business world; the organizational leadership shapes the organizational performance, as it is the primary determinant of the performance (Reid 2017). The term, strategic leadership’ can be defined by the plan of operations that involves a wide range of planning, profound and complicated decisions and many more. This leadership also entails the decision making procedure across diverse cultures, individuals, agendas and agencies. Therefore this involves desirable and feasible plans which can be acceptable to the organization and its stakeholders as well (Daft 2014). However, there are always challenges for the management within the organization. This report discusses the strategic leadership and the related ethical issues on the basis of the Starbucks environmental problem. The issue has raised many questions for the organization initially; however, the organization has solved the issues right away. Therefore this report will discuss this ethical leadership issue and the later impacts of leadership on the development of the organization.
As stated by Peer and Webster (2016) there are several kinds of leadership, such as autocratic leadership, democratic leadership, strategic leadership, transformational leadership etc. The strategic leadership is the one which entails a leader who is mostly the head of a particular organization. However, the strategic leader does not confine his or her leadership skills only to the people who are at the top positions within the organization. Strategic leaders have impacted a lot of employees within the organization at all the levels. The strategic leader mostly fills up the space between the requirement of practicality and the possibility by providing a new set of rules and habits. Therefore the strategic leader always delivers what exactly is expected out of his or her position in the organization. This leadership also involves the strategic thinking. After the year old CEO of Starbucks left the organization, the new CEOs did not seem to handle the organization, like it was done previously. The Brand is trusted as the best brand for providing coffee to people; however, it started getting commoditized (Morais et al. 2014). The brand name was hampered to a great extent, while the management had made effective changes and few years later the CEO was changed again. This ritual kept on happening several times and after a certain point of time, the previous CEO came back to his job. It was repeatedly mentioned that the new CEOs could not do the succession plan in a right way which enhanced the way of coming back he old one. This issue has hampered the brand name to a great extent and the investors of the brand at the same time. However the comeback of the old CEO was viewed as more positively than negatively.
Over the past years, the leadership is defined as a contemporary approach of managing the employees as well as the organization to a broad range. Therefore the strategic integration of the innovative leadership style into the employee engagement and organization improvement has improved the employee performance. The ethical and strategic leaders are expected to have good diagnostic power of the problems; therefore they should also develop the style for meeting the situational demands where they are operating. The primary objective of every organization is creating profit as it is the measurer of the surplus amount (Marques, Dhiman and Holt 2015). For accomplishing the effective goal of the management, it is the leader’s job to create an environment where the employees can work in an effective way. Christensen, Mackey and Whetten (2014) has indicated several times, that the demographics of the workplace is directly related with the output and productivity of the organization. It should also be noted that the types of personality of the leaders is positively related with the intentions of turnover. The differences in the job satisfaction can occur because of the personality differences. Other than that, the leadership styles also have a positive impact on the employee engagement, which is mostly defined as the involvement and identification of the individuals with the mission, goal and value of the organization. The higher the engagement is, the more productivity the employees have beyond any kind of personal factors. The motivated employees are more focused towards their jobs. This also indicates that they can work in a more efficient way having the success of the organization as their primary goal (Niemuth et al. 2014). In addition to that, the leaders also have a huge impact on the organizational development within the organization. Past researches have also shown that the leadership styles have a great influence on the employee engagement. The transformational leadership tends to limit the capabilities of leaders for achieving the greater performance from employee; however, it is only done for a short-term basis. On the other hand, the strategic leadership helps the leaders to engage the employees with the organization which eventually turn into a greater organizational performance.
The Starbucks has started its journey from a small coffee shop; however it has turned into a brand that provides the best coffee all over the world. It has more than seventeen hundred stores all around the world. It has a matrix organizational structure which is a mixture of several features from all over the world. The most dominant features of the organization are the functional structure, product based and geographic divisions and the teams. The issues with the newly appointed leaders have impacted the organizational structure in an entirely negative way (Leavy 2015). The previous CEO was an experienced one who has experience with this field for more than thirty years. Therefore, he was capable of ensuring the organizational readiness. With an effective utilization of the experience and wisdom, the leader was capable of conduct the complicated operations along with ensuring that the employees are growing within their time in the organization. However, this factor was entirely absent in the tenure of the new CEOs which hampered the internal organizational structure. The effective leaders are expected to interview, hire and train the potential human resources which will enrich the organization in the long run. The training and development sessions also tend to retain the employees within the organization. In general it can be said that the changes in the higher management level for several times has failed that the succession planning of the organization, eventually the organizational structure did not remain stable and intact (Tyre 2015). This has affected the teams and the different product based divisions of Starbucks. It was also evident with the demise of the brand during the period that the new leaders lack the problem solving activities. As stated by Allen et al. (2016), the effective leaders establish transparent procedures and policies because a clear evaluation of the operational metrics can ensure that the production level meets the desired outcomes. However, with the unstable higher management the entire organization was affected in a negative way. The strategic leaders only consider providing the best service and meeting the desired outcomes, however in this case the desired outcome was not met. Therefore it has contributed in hampering the strategic leadership to a great extent.
On the basis of an efficient business plan and the functional plan of the organization, the organization, Starbucks has created a monopolistic situation within the global coffee industry. The organization has always made sure that it set each of the essential steps I order to reach the organizational objectives. Starbucks is a company with multiple outlets all over the world; therefore it is the leader’s job to execute the mission and vision statement of the organization and maintain the finest quality of the service that the organization provides. However, with the leadership issue, a huge gap created within the cultural and the intercultural communication within the organization (Haskova 2015). The effective leaders should always set the realistic goals which are mostly focused on being a successful organization. The business of Starbucks is a global one; however it always has its own culture which has contributed shaping the business and its employees over the years. Even though the new CEOs were a part of the organization from before, they seem not be able to cope up with the higher management. There was a huge gap that has been created between the management and the employees due to the cultural and intercultural gap within the organization. Hamann et al. (2014) has indicated that this can also be the outcome of overestimation of their capability even though there was a serious lack in the experiences in this field. Starbucks always had an atmosphere of safety, trust and stability which has shaped its organizational structure, however this was hampered to a great extent. Starbucks has also changed its vision statement several times during this period which affected the brand value.
The consideration of the ethical approaches on the contemporary leadership is the one which provides the basic foundation of the corporate and global priorities beyond the conventional ideas of the businesses involving only the generation of profit and enriching the shareholders. The contemporary leadership is quite influenced by the ethical obligations such as corporate social responsibility, ethical management, corporate governance and sustainability etc. This consideration also gives raise to the question of being ethical. Even though defining the ethical ones can be a little tricky, but the ethical philosophy considered that the organization should adhere to the generosity, justice and charity which ultimately benefit the society (Schein 2015). However, the unstable leadership situation has impacted the ethical consideration of the organization as well. Within this period, Starbuck has been accused of using inordinate water to the drinks of the customers, even though United States was suffering from draught during that time. This act was considered to be an unethical being for Starbucks and it had impacted the brand value of the organization to a great extent. The organization has been well-known for maintaining the ethical grounds, which was been hampered with this incident. Furthermore it has indicated that the unstable leadership can affect the good will of the organization as well. However, the organization took immediate actions and the issue resolved after a while, but the brand value of the organization was hampered.
Considering the value based leadership, it can be said that this kind of leadership tends to stay true to the core values of the organization. This also leads to the meaning that the organization needs to remain constant to the beliefs of the leader and it will not sway from the fundamental values. This approach of leadership is also based on the idea that the personalized value of the leaders and the organizational values are well assigned. The strategy, mission, vision, values, performance measures are also a profound representation of the values and ethics of the leaders (Grossman and Valiga 2016). However, the activities of Starbucks during that period did not indicate that the leader of the organization is being true to the mission and vision statement of the organization. The organization was not being able to adhere to the ethical and social duties as well.
Conclusion:
From a small scale organization, Starbucks has developed to a multinational chain. However in this evolution period, there may be several gaps in serving around 50 million customers all over the world. However, the leaders of the organization should work across the cultures, regions so that they can cope up with different kinds of circumstances they are facing. In recovering such issues, the organization can follow the Fiedler Contingency Model, which propose that the effectual group performances are mostly dependent on the perfect match of the style of leadership and the amount of influence and control the leader has on the situation. Therefore this can help the organization to measure the effective leadership qualities among the employees. In a nutshell, it can be said that whether it is a large or a small organization, every organization needs an effective and experienced leader. Therefore the leaders should always improve positively so that the organizational objectives can be achieved consistently.
References
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Christensen, L.J., Mackey, A. and Whetten, D., 2014. Taking responsibility for corporate social responsibility: The role of leaders in creating, implementing, sustaining, or avoiding socially responsible firm behaviors. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(2), pp.164-178.
Daft, R.L., 2014. The leadership experience. Cengage Learning.
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Grossman, S. and Valiga, T.M., 2016. The new leadership challenge: Creating the future of nursing. FA Davis.
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Niemuth, S., Hamann, L., Luschnat, K., Smolarz, P. and Golombek, S., 2014. CSR in the Coffee Industry: Sustainability Issues at Nestlé-Nespresso and Starbucks. Journal of European Management & Public Affairs Studies, 2(1), pp.31-36.
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