LNDN09007: Theoretical Perspectives of Management – Assessment Element

Responsible Management, Leadership and Workplace Practice

This essay examines responsible management through delegation, problem-solving, adaptability and team-building. It applies ethical leadership theory and responsible management as-practice to examples from Marks & Spencer, Toyota, IKEA, Ryanair, the British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK and Sainsbury’s, incorporating insights relevant to assignment help UK while showing how managers combine knowledge, resources and coordinated action to improve organisational performance and stakeholder outcomes.

Introduction

Any responsible manager, whether in for-profit or not-for-profit companies, must put the organisation’s needs and success over their individual interest. However, self-development matters for a responsible manager due to changing market conditions, industrial transformations and the like. This helps them to handle challenges concerning the delegation of duties, time management, fostering their emotional intelligence, and enhancing their problem-solving competencies. This essay will expand these characteristics critically through context-based analysis and theoretical evaluation, establishing scholarly ideologies within practice.

Discussion

There are different profit-making organisations spanning retail, manufacturing, logistics, tourism, and other markets. Any responsible manager's ideology would harmonise within their company based on the respective industry they represent. Still, the characteristics of profit-making enterprises more or less remain the same (Waldman et al., 2019). This can be established through the 'ethical leadership theory' principle that allows managers to handle responsibilities and duties in an inspiring manner, thereby influencing subordinates to replicate the consistency of the responsible manager (Waldman et al., 2019).

Delegation of duties: A responsible manager’s duty requires them to understand prospective situations involving employees, teams, executives, and broader stakeholders with external responsibilities. A manager streamlines the organisation’s goals through work-based tasks, subordinated to the workforce staff, thereby aligning organisational behaviour in workings with strategic business objectives, before finalising the outcome-led benefits for stakeholders and shareholders alike (Waldman et al., 2019). For instance, CEO Stuart Machin of Marks and Spencer considers establishing a goal that might regulate the use of other objectives, task divisions based on the same, and overall results influencing outside party interests (Butler, 2024). In recent years, Marks and Spencer's only goal was to increase their sales margins by over 11%, which might correspondingly assist them in increasing their store strengths from 240 to 325 (Butler, 2024).

Problem-solving: Once the tasks are set, the responsible manager breaks down potential issues before they arise, especially by consulting past performances based on similar tasks (Wrede et al., 2020). Then, consider the skill sets and attributes of its staff members who will handle the tasks before planning how better the task can be managed overall. For instance, the chief executive and manager of a leading automobile manufacturer Toyota, believes that problem-solving can be achieved by prioritisation of individual cogs associated with tasks (Power, 2021). This is similar to how the company incorporated their 8-step problem-solving model to increase the productivity of its resource utilisation practices, by reducing excess labour participation in lean management practices (Power, 2021).  

Adaptability: Certain shifts which occur in the market, might take the employees and some of the enterprise stakeholders aback concerning the changes coming into place. These changes are reflected through departmental responsibility reverses, yearly goal alterations, switching objective preferences, and others (Borgert Armani et al., 2020). A responsible manager will look to prepare both its workforce and other higher authority-based stakeholders through the exchange of knowledge after they eventually accept change going through the firm. For instance, Jon Abrahamsson Ring of Inter IKEA tackled competition by transforming the business through rapid digitisation. This was an anticipated development by the manager, allowing the firm to invest $800 billion by 2024 to prepare efficiency in its operations (Jackson, 2024). It involved the creation of mobile applications, utilisation of enterprise resource planning software, installation of ‘click and collect systems’ within stores, and others (Jackson, 2024).

Team-building: a responsible manager’s characteristic is also defined by how well they can manage teams, by investing time and resources for their individual growth and development and cycling their attitudes and behaviours to work with each other after balancing duties and tasks (Ayu Nani et al., 2021). For instance, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson revealed that team bonding before team-building was key and that it could follow unconventional methods to bloom the above in different organisational settings (Ryanair.com, 2023). For instance, the company team executives were to lead customers to events like Grand Prix racing events, sailing activities in Barcelona, or even navigate through museums. That would give both team members and customers ample challenges to resolve in real-time, improving team bonding before eventually allowing the same to be reflected in company departmental tasks (Ryanair.com, 2023).

A theoretical framework built by Silvia Ghehrardi and Oliver Lasch known as ‘Responsible Management as-practice’, concerns the ideology that any organisational management runs itself through the unity of systematic knowledge acquired internally and externally, before manifesting the same into directed actions (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2022). A few elements that are connected to the theory can be used in an organisational context as follows.

Firstly, situation-based knowledge often proves critical for many responsible managers. For instance, Beatrice Butsana Sita of the British Red Cross independently launched initiatives or events through which disaster recovery funds can be accumulated from citizens (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2022). This shows initiative, rather than allocating separate funds from their normal donations (Philanthropy News Digest, 2024).

Secondly, socio-material arrangements are also key aspects of the theory, which looks to concentrate on resource management and cultural acceptance of the way it occurs within the firm (Zhang et al., 2022). For instance, Cancer Research UK manager Michelle Mitchell allowed 1000 of its volunteers to go out of their way, in spreading awareness of cancer-related initiatives by participating in marathons (Berry, 2022). This initiative allowed the bond to develop between managers and employees, especially as the former allowed the latter free reign to use their ideas in promoting an idea related to the charity (Berry, 2022).

Thirdly, the unity of both situation-based knowledge and socio-material arrangement results in the interconnectedness of practices within organisations (Zhang et al., 2022). For instance, a manager's approach depends on the outcomes from the interconnectedness achieved from the above situations, in which case both positive and negative results allow the manager to parry their characteristics. Similar to how Sainsbury’s manager Simon Roberts emphasised how retail skillsets of employees could be aligned with operational capabilities to refine performance (Webber, 2023).