HR Assignment help online:: Case study analysis on HR policies – Models & Styles of leadership & 24Jam

Key Problems / Issues Identified 

 ‘24JAM’, a convenience giant store in Singapore was writing new success stories under the flagship of Richard Lim, but by March 2005 24 Jam’s fortune took a dramatic turn with the two events that were:

• Discovery of   an explosive lookalike device in the 24 Holland Village Store and the Orchard Rd Store. This led to falling of stock prices of 24 Jam from $ 4 to $2.
•  Consequently the news of Richard Lim’s heart attack led to further falling in the stock prices of 24 Jam to $1.

Both the above events led to acquisition of 24Jam by the Hong Kong based retailer called, Canton Investments. This gave rise to many problems and issues which are listed below:

• Aggressive management Approach of Canton Investments.
• Imposing their own leadership and management style on the employees
• Staff feeling  dejected and  demoralised at the same time
• Numerous customer complaints related to poor and  unfriendly  services at 24Jam
• Many employees quitting or planning to quit leading to higher attrition rate in 24Jam.
• Employees who had left planned to pose a threat or competition to 24Jam by opening their own convenience stores.

These issues which have been highlighted are very important because these are the main cause resulting in downfall of 24Jam which was once a major success in Singapore. The main causes which have been identified for the problems or the issues highlighted are:

• Change in the Leadership Style earlier Richard Lim followed Charismatic Leadership Style where there were some reflection of trash formational leadership and he always inspired the employees of 24Jam to fill them with enthusiasm and motivated his teams to always move forward which led to teams working towards full commitment towards work which reflected in least customer complaints. But in case of Sam Wong, who followed the Autocratic style of leadership (Kano, 2012) where the leader has complete power over the staff and people. Staff and the team members have very little time to make any suggestions.
• Staff felt dejected and demoralised because of the new CEO Sam Wong used aggressive tone, was unwilling to listen to the employees’ ideas and the issues which led to employee dissatisfaction (Murray, 2012).
•  Ending of the barnstorming sessions was considered to be waste of time by Sam Wong and he replaced it with self-directed teams which followed the traditional hierarchical structure.
• The profit-sharing scheme was also removed thus the employees did not have any motivation to strive towards work.
• Installation of video cameras led the staff think that a close eye has been kept on them.
•  Wearing uniforms in Sam Wong’s time made the staff feel as if they were being ruled under typical military like autocratic style. 

Theories/ Concepts / Models relevant in Understanding the Case 

Organisation

The concept of organization is not new and the term ‘organization’ has many definitions attached to it and organisation in plain and simple language can be defined as an activity which forms the important function of management and in any organisation the people are being united for a common purpose. This is what even Richard Lim followed. As stated in the definition by Mooney and Riley (Mooney and Reiley, 1939) “Organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of common purpose.” This means that the people who work towards a common goal along with each other form an organisation (Ahmad, Gilkar and Darzi, 2008). In this case also all the staff and the employees along with CEO or senior management are working towards a common goal of achieving profits and making the convenience store a successful store in Singapore.

 Organisational Behaviour

Organisational behaviour is mainly the study as well as application of that studied knowledge regarding how the people as individuals as well as in groups work or act within any organisation (Ahmad, Gilkar and Darzi, 2008). The main aim of organisational behaviour is to find out the most effectual and effective ways in which people can work for any organisation. It is very useful set of tools which helps managers at various levels of analysis which are listed below:

• Helps in identification of individual behaviour in the organisation
•  Understand the complexities which are involved in inter-personal relations during interaction of two people.
• Helps in finding the dynamics of relationship i.e. formal or informal
• Finding the inter-organisational relationships  for example joint ventures,  managers etc. (Jain, 2005)

 Organisational behaviour has been defined as the study of human behaviour          in the settings of an organisation and as the interface between the human behaviour and the organizational context and d the organisation itself (Griffin and Moorhead, 2009). The main goals which have been identified in organisational behaviour are understanding, predicting, controlling human behaviour and describing the human behaviour mainly in the context of organisational environment. There are many theories of organisational behaviour which have been divided as per:

• Decision Making
•  Personality  Traits Theories
•  Control sand Stress Modelling
• Motivation  in Organizations

The human behaviour in the organisation is involved basically at the three levels majorly:  individual, group and organization.

• Individual Concept: It is concerned with the behaviour of any individual who forms the basic component of the organisation .These concepts cover personality, creativity, motivation, behaviours, perception, learning, needs, attitudes and stress.
• Group Concepts: It involves the interaction which occurs between two or more individual in the organisational setting. It covers concepts like intergroup conflict, power and politics, group dynamics and leadership.
• Organisational Concepts:  It is related to the organisation itself. It covers topics like, performance appraisal, problem-solving, decision-making, organisational structure, job design, rewards, communication and organisational design.

Thus in case of 24JAM the concept which is applicable is the Organisational Concept because the issues which are being analysed are mainly related to the organization itself and decision-making, job design etc. needs to be changed. The change in the organisational structure is what caused the problem at the first go.

 Organisational Structure

It is the structure which is established within the organisation for conducting the business effectively. It can be said as an established pattern of the relationship which exists within various components and parts of the organisation (Kast and Rosenzweig, 1979) . Thus we can say that organization structure is the network of relationships which exists in an organisation amongst various individuals and positions. The elements of organization structure are as follows:

•  Intentionally Created
• Use of Charts
•  Provides a Framework
•  Provides Formal  picture of organisation

Thus first thing which 24Jam needs is organisation structure because organisation structures:

• Helps in organising the work they do.
•  Clear structure helps in knowing who is doing what.

 Line and Staff Organisation Structure

 In this kind of organisation Structure line executives and the staff are being combined together. The line executives are the ‘doers’ while the staffs are being called the experts and they act as ‘thinkers’ (Akrani, 2010). It can be seen in the diagram below:

Figure 1: Line and Staff Organisation Structure (Akrani, 2010)

The benefits attached with Line and Staff organisation are:

• Lesser burden on the line executives
•  Sound decision-making
• Limited tension and stress on the line-managers
•  Provides training opportunities to the employees
•  Services of experts are available
•  Provides benefits from specialization (Akrani, 2010)

 This line and staff structure was being followed by Richard Lim while the organisational structure being followed by Sam Wong was the Line Organisations Structure.

 Line Organisation Structure

 This is the simplest yet the oldest form of organisation structure and was developed by the Roman Army. In this kind of structure the  line of authority moves directly from the  top level to the lowest level and that too in step-by-step manner (Organisational Structures: BTEC Business, 2006). The top level management has all the rights to issue directions for executives and to take decisions. While in this case the responsibility moves in upwards direction (Akrani, 2010). But using this organisation structure by Sam Wong created dire consequences for the organisation which were:

•  Heavy Burden on the line executives
•  Favouritism
•  Non-availability of the services from the experts
•  Delay in communications amongst the staff
• Limited freedom to the employees
• Too much dependency on the limited executives (Akrani, 2010).

 Mintzberg Managerial Roles Theory

 This is basically the decision-making theory according to which Henry Mintzberg in late 1960’s identified 10 managerial roles after a very careful study of the executives in various organisations and then divided them into three categories which can be seen in the diagram below:

An ideal manger should follow all the above roles and the  interpersonal roles makes sure that  relevant information is being provided, informational roles do the task of linking all  the managerial works together while the decisional roles  make the most significant use of the available information (Mintzberg, 1973). The functional speciality influences the relative importance of the various managerial roles (Mintzberg, 1990). The whole framework for the Mintzberg’s theory can be understood from the diagram shown below:

 In this case of 24Jam where Richard Lim followed all the managerial roles and acted as figurehead, performed leadership, did visioning wherever needed, monitored, disseminated information, acted as spokesperson, entrepreneur, problem solver, resources allocator and negotiator. When store though of expanding into insurance, banking , bill paying services etc, Lim did performed leadership role , told all the staff about the listing of company in public, acted as company’s spokesperson and  solved the problem of company of generating funds by raising the capital for the stores through going public. Thus he allocated and resources the capital for the company. While selling also he negotiated well with Canton Investments and took the right decisions of selling it off.

 The Neo-Charismatic Leadership Theory

This Theory of Neo-charismatic Leadership is based upon the Theory of Charismatic Leadership proposed by House (1977) as well as Burns (1978). The neo-charismatic theories of leadership are mainly focussed on the interpersonal processes which occur between the followers and the leaders (House, Wright and Aditya, 1997). The main focus of these theories is on the process of leadership within the organization however these processes can be applied effectually across the organisation on all the organisations. The transformational as well as charismatic leaders have the followers who love to imitate them and the followers want to perform beyond expectations. This is the kind of leadership which Richard Lim followed in 24JAM (Bass, 1985) (Avolio, 1999). The followers of neo-charismatic theory are very much open to the changes in their worldview and readily accept the new values and changes happening in the thinking and strategies (Boal and Hooijberg, 2000).

 As studied by Zaccaro and Banks (2001), for any organizational leadership the fundamental requirement is the ideas for setting the directions which should be taken for collective efforts in order to achieve organisational progress. The main focus of the neo-charismatic’s theories (Conger and Kanungo, 1998) and the social distance (Shamir, 1995) is on self-presentation and self-perceptions which is very relevant and helpful in finding how   Advanced Information Technology (AIT) has impact on the leaders who are working at a distance virtually with the followers. 

Recommendations / Solutions for Improvement

The main objectives for resolving the case of 24JAM is to make it a customer oriented and a successful convenience store as it used to be. Some of the primary and secondary objectives are listed below:

• To develop a strategy for  Change Management
•  Tackling the changed organisational culture which covers leadership, motivation, job satisfaction, communication practices as well as values.
• Creation of better organisational culture where employees are satisfied
• Reduce the threat of new entrants for 24Jam
• Reduce the rate of attrition in 24Jam

 Rationale for recommendations 

The Recommendations which I think would work best for 24Jam are:

• Change in Leadership Style

The Leadership style of 24Jam, which has turned out to be more autocratic with the arrival of Sam Wong, the new CEO appointed by Canton Investments, needs to be altered. The employees cherish and love the neo-charismatic style of leadership as we have seen in the above mentioned theory of neo-charismatic leadership. This leadership theory is mainly focussed on leadership and the followers always want to outperform the given targets and want to imitate their leaders. So it is mainly leadership by setting examples. There should be delegation of authority which will bring in high level of job satisfaction too. This can be done by either appointing a new CEO from within the organization or new one after checking his leadership style and skills.

• Follow Mintzberg’s Model of Managerial Roles

The new leader should be able to depict all the 10 managerial roles which have been classified by Mintzberg in this theory according to which the CEO of 24Jam should have the capability to show interpersonal, informational as well as decisional roles at the same time. This quality was present with Richard Lim and Sam Wong lacked in many of the managerial roles. Either Sam Wong should be trained about the organisational culture persisting in 24Jam or should be trained about the managerial roles which he should inculcate in his personality to be an effective leader.

• Implementation of Line and Staff organisation Structure

With the acquisition of Canton Investment of 24 Jam the organisational structure suddenly changed to line structure due to which there was employee dissatisfaction and the attrition rate grew very high. So the company needs to follow the Line and Staff organisation structure in order to make the decision-making sound, reduce the stress of change amongst the line members. This can be done by following an effective change management strategy which should have proper communication; training and interaction programs where the line executives get to know their managers and understand the new organisational culture well. 

Implementation Plan and Time Frame for the recommendations 

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