Comparing B&Q's Structure And Culture With Coca Cola In An Essay.

1. Current structure and culture at B&Q and comparison with Coca Cola?

2. Different approaches for the leader ship and management?

3. Use of different motivation theories across coca cola and B&Q?

4. Understand mechanisms for developing effective teamwork in organisations?

B & Q is a public limited company which was founded in 1969, by Richard Block and David Quayle in UK. For this the company is originally named as Block & Quayle. It has many stores across the world. It is a retailing industry. The product of this company is DIY home improvement tool and Gardening supplies and plants.

P1.1: In the above mentioned case the B & Q Company has followed different workforce diversity in terms of age, organizational culture, language, behaviour, and management. This helps the organization to increase its productivity and creativity (Asaecenter.org, 2015). The above case shows that the B & Q Company tends to hire old age employee rather than young employee. The management of the company realised the benefits of hiring old age people. Old age people are more dedicated to the work than young people. They can provide high quality product. Senior people are highly committed to their work. They are likely to arrive at the workplace at right time (BandQ-Annual-Review-2013-2014, 2015). Employees of old age are mostly honest which include personal integrity and devotion to the truth. These kinds of employees are good listeners, so they can be trained in an easier way for improvement. Pride in job done rather than final product can be seen among the young people, whereas old people only believe in final product. The experience of old age people can be utilized in the improvement of product. They are confident to recommend their ideas for organizational development. Hiring old age is also a cost effective strategy. For this reason it can be seen that the Macclesfield store had done better than other stores (Bhasin, 2012).

B & Q follows an organic structure in their system, which may not be highly specialised, and employees may perform a variety of tasks to accomplish the group task. Tasks are not elaborately specified; they may be adjusted and redefined through employee interaction. Informal hierarchy of authority and control with few roles is maintained. Knowledge and control of task are located anywhere in the organization. Communication is horizontal and employees talk to whomever they need to communicate with (C U S T O M E R S U C C E S S, 2015).

We can compare the structure of B & Q Company with the structure of Coca Cola Company, where this company also follows the organic structure. As the success of the company depends on its ability to connect with local consumers, it makes sense for the coca cola company to be organized into a regional structure which combines centralisation and localisation (Ciber.com, 2015).

P1.2: Organizational culture can be defined as a general constellation of belief, morals, value systems, behavioural norms, and ways of doing business that are unique to each corporation. The employees of B & Q Company seem to share a concern for the value of time. Thos create dominant culture in the organization. Dominant culture is marked as a set of core values that are shared by a majority of the organizational members (CIYUAN, 2015). The subculture of this company is expressed as a set of values that are shared by a specific group of division. The employees of this company who share a same kind of problem share the problem with each other to solve that problem. This company support workforce diversity in their organisational culture to establish their organization worldwide. They use diversity in language in a positive way to connect with people worldwide (Davies et al., 2015). The core values of B & Q are intensively held and widely used. This makes the strong culture of that company. The more the core values are shared the stronger the culture of the organization is. In order for people to share the same culture, there is an orientation programme in this company that tells the new comer the philosophy and method of operation of the company. They promote employees who hold the core values, which in turn help others to as well to better understand the core value. They usually avoid weak culture where employees do not share anything to each other. This in turn creates high turnover (Diy.com, 2015).

Organizational culture facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger than one’s individual self interest. The organizational culture of B &Q Company can be compared to the culture of Coca Cola Company. The inclusive culture of Coca Cola Company is defined by core values: leadership, passion, diversity, accountability, collaboration, quality. The diversity workplace strategy of this company is to attract, retain, and develop diverse talent, and to provide support to the people with diverse background. They also educate all their associates to develop the skill of the employees to achieve goal of the organization and sustain growth (Docslide.us, 2015).

The structure of the company is a framework for the culture which is to be implemented. Culture dictates how a structure of a company would be. Functional organizational structure severely affect  the performance of a company by the time it takes flow of communication through various levels of hierarchy which makes the organization slow to cop up with new technology, the economy, the political party, social and cultural changes (EDWARDS, 1970). On the other hand divisional structure has greater flexibility in the operation of the business. This increases the capability of an organization to make change which makes the company competitive, able to meet the changing needs of the customers. In the above mentioned case we can see that the diversity manager reports directly to the chief executive. From this it can be realised that B & Q Company follows an organic structure where communication is flexible. One can share problems with each other. Diversity in communication widens communication channels in which employees can directly communicate with chief executive to share problem (Ferris, 2015).

P1.3: Employees of the company need to feel happy and comfortable in the workplace. The employees of B &Q Company are asked what they can perform best and then they are assigned a job so that they can give best results. Effective communication is maintained in this company. As this organization follows organic structure the employees of this organization makes a good friendship with each other (Ivythesis.typepad.com, 2015).

P.2.1 Leadership and Management style at B&Q

In an organization, leader plays a role to motivate the employees to achieve the organizational goals. B&Q has a leadership role in home improvement retailing to examine the sources of its products for ethical standards. In UK, B&Q is considered to be a market leader. As comparison with its nearby competitors, the industry’s size is twice. The mission of B&Q is to help the customers to improve their home by giving varieties of products that is required to improve their homed under one roof (Kammerer, 2015). B&Q has flatter organizational structure to reflect its culture. Employees have the power to express their own ideas relating to the business. Thus, they have freedom to express their thoughts with the senior managers. B&Q focuses to achieve the organizational goals for future growth. For example, recently B&Q launched Dragon’s Den-style panel which helps to filter the innovative ideas of the workers, which is known as Innovation Den. The employees those are working within an organization are differentiated from each other by work attitudes, age, education, values and aspirations (Legacee, 2015).

Effective teamwork mechanisms in organizations

Leadership and Management Style at Coca Cola

Coca cola is the leader in beverage and food industry and well known for its high sales. The vision of Coca Cola is to inspire the workers to achieve their goal. In this industry’s management style, the employees are given responsibilities to make their own decisions. The employees will be responsible for taking any kind of wrong decisions (Researchgate.net, 2015).  The managers want feedback from the employees on the decisions they have made. This kind of management is better for the employees as it makes them happy and the productivity is also high. Coca cola focuses on the programs that help to assure the success of their commitment to embracing the similarities and differences of the ideas, cultures and people (Managementparadise.com, 2015).

P.2.2 Leadership and management style at B&Q is supported by organizational theory:

At B&Q, it uses learning, development and performance as the motivational tools. The staffs are friendly and customer oriented and they are providing better customer service as well as they have product knowledge.   As per the Henri Fayol’s organizational theory, the staffs are specialized in different departments and the productivity increases as the staffs are well skilled and efficient in their work. Fayol includes the functional areas such as planning, directing, controlling, organizing and coordinating. At B&Q, the industry moves towards the objectives in a direction (Sami Malallah's Blog, 2010).

Organisational theory defines how diverse people work together. Diversity is to be considered as important issues due to increasing population and companies should focus on diversity as it has the potential of greater productivity. As per Taylor’s s theory, B&Q needs to train the staffs to improve their effectiveness. This theory proposed that the staffs are required to train so that their efficiency is to be increased by changing the working conditions. Age is one of the traits within an organization (Scribd.com, 2015).

Analysis by using relevant theories of Leadership and Management:

B&Q has a policy that the employees are selected based on their ability to provide the knowledge and service. According to behavioural theory of leadership and management, one employee is more educated than other, so that person is to be selected to lead the team and the employees are willing to follow the instructions. The task is to be distributed by the team leader. The work which is assigned to the employees should complete in time if the organization provides a suitable working environment to them. As per transformational theory, the employees are to be motivated under the authority (TEAM, 2015). For example, the manager aware their employees about the importance of task and inspires them to compete the task within time. Thus, this theory seeks to be self-interest. The leadership-management theory also states that rewards are also given to the employees to inspire the employees to be succeeded in the task; the rewards are profit sharing, financial rewards, and bonuses.

p.2.3 Theories and other sources of information to evaluate different approaches in Coca Cola:

The three approaches to Coca Cola are to meet the needs of the customers, to be the best industry at serving that particular market segment and to offer different types of products at different market segments. The two organizational theories are to be used to analyze Coca cola; those two theories are modernism theory and post modernism theory. Modernism theory states that the modern world is full of power as well as energy. The world is changing day-by-day and the taste of the customers is also changing so the industry is described by its production in the competitive market. Modernism means the creation of more new opportunities in the marketplace. Post modernism means arising a great difference on former period of modernity. Modernity can lead to certain changes.

p.3.1 Impact of different leadership styles for motivation: To achieve the ultimate business success it is required for almost each of the organization to motivate their employees. It will be considered as much more beneficial for an organization if it became possible to involve employees for more of the challengeable task and let the employees to update their level of expertise and knowledge as per the task requirement (Harlacher, Potter and Weber, 2014). Numbers of motivational theories are there to bring out most of the objective oriented characteristics form employees. Those motivational theories consist of Hierarchy of needs, carrot and stick and Motivation-hygiene theory. To impose all of these theories, numbers of leadership style have been adopted in both of the organization.

p.3.2 In case of B&Q, managers and higher authorities are focused upon forming such a team that with loads of enthusiasm and with a nice attitude. In B&Q there are numbers of teams to give ultimate support for the business processes and to have ultimate customer support. There are numbers of teams and leadership styles have been imposed on the organization to bring out better work flow within the organization. There are service team, Sales team, support team, expert team and there. Leaders in the service team are responsible for delivering great customer service and giving response to the customers’ feedback or any kind of queries. They motivate their employees to give their best when handling customer feedback (Ivythesis.typepad.com, 2015). Leaders within this team are much more focused upon improving team members’ interpersonal skill instigate them to be more dedicated using the stick and carrot theory on the other hand give team members the handful of training to deal with product customization as per the customers’ requirement. On the other hand, members of the respective team are given proper support to let their potential customer know about the specification of their preferred products. There is also another training is provided to make customer happy by providing customer centric products and make customer satisfied at utmost level. On the other hand, being organised team leaders provide task and overall work processes in an organised manner and much more focused on building strong relationship with all customers (TrainingZone.co.uk, 2009).

On the other had qualified experts are there in one store as a team and they are engaged to give professional advice on their knowledge domain.

On the other hand Coca cola’s CEO succession process was known as the ad-hoc process. The leadership style of CEOs at the Coca Cola is different from the traditional leadership style. Companies like Coca Cola is focused upon the successful leadership styles, qualities and skills. In companies like Coca Cola assess their employees on the psychological factors depending upon the unique qualities. While they focus upon praising employees within the company evaluate employees and reward them as per their behaviours and work.

Leader for different team in Coca Cola ensures that the employees are given an opportunity along with the motivation to learn and develop skills time to time by possessing successful leadership skills (Legacee, 2015). 

While it is required in an organization to develop different leadership theories, it is require in an organization to introduce some tools and methodologies, in order instigate employee performance towards a positive direction. There must be number of tools and methods needs to be introduced in order to get the more accurate and customer centric approach. For example, use of AI tools those can give managers and higher authorities some appropriate suggestions to mitigate risk and to take appropriate set of actions (Asaecenter.org, 2015). These AI tools are nothing but the machine learning tools those gather data from the central repository or can access data directly by the manual intervention. Data are fetched using mining tools and they are analyzed also using analytics tools. Numbers of AI tools are there those take advantage of all these analysis and learn to produce result or suggestion for a given scenarios. This system on the other hand gives the proper scenario to let the team members and higher authorities to give response quickly in account of a particular problem. Hence, it increases the overall possibility to instigate the level of customer satisfaction (BandQ-Annual-Review-2013-2014, 2015).

p.3.3 Motivation theory helps manager to let their employees to be indulged more in taking challenges and to be more professional and expertise on overall system specification (BandQ-Annual-Review-2013-2014, 2015).

p.4.1 There are numbers of group within the B&Q and these groups play an important role in water with the help of products group. There is also a UK youth group at every store of B&Q. These youth groups are allowed to come into the store and four times in a year to raise money during pick trading periods.

In B&Q there are almost 5 existing stores where ration of sales have been grown with new LED lighting technology. LED lighting technology has been installed in seven respective stores by bringing the total number of stores with LED lighting to 2013.

In the year of 2013, B&Q has been completed a wide-ranging investment study for making analysis of available options for the offsite renewable energy generation.

B&Q is considering the net use of information and address the zero carbon challenge considering the long term support. The CSR team is now developing the detailed business case based upon the outputs based upon several reports (CIYUAN, 2015).

p.4.2 B&Q is much more indulged in hiring Employees of old age those are mostly honest which include personal integrity and devotion to the truth. They are likely to arrive at the workplace at right time. B&Q has noticed these kinds of employees are good listeners, so they can be trained in an easier way for improvement (BandQ-Annual-Review-2013-2014, 2015). Pride in job done rather than final product can be seen among the young people, whereas old people only believe in final product. The experience of old age people can be utilized in the improvement of product. They are confident to recommend their ideas for organizational development. Hiring old age is also a cost effective strategy. For this reason it can be seen that the Macclesfield store had done better than other stores. On the other hand B&Q believes to train their employees for upcoming trends in the market and there are numbers of technologies have been used, for example, use of LED light.

At B&Q, numbers of motivational tools are in use, such as learning, development and performance. The staffs are friendly and customer oriented and they are providing better customer service as well as they have product knowledge and they are highly motivated to give their customer utmost satisfaction with their products and services (Asaecenter.org, 2015). According to the Henri Fayol’s organizational theory, the staffs are specialized in different departments and the productivity increases as the staffs are well skilled and efficient in their work. Fayol has incorporated numbers of functional areas for the smooth flow of work on the other hand these functional areas are much more concerned with the high customer satisfaction, hence it have been possible for B&Q to retain their potential customer and attracting new customer. At B&Q, the industry moves towards the objectives in a direction (Diy.com, 2015).

p.4.3 There is a number of numbers of performance expectations are established for each of group and there are number of KPI has been set and on the other hand there are several levels of competence and attainment have been created within companies’ development framework. The PMS have been introduced for the management team is known as Podium review. In this podium review management teams are assessed against three criteria, namely behaviours, standards and result (Asaecenter.org, 2015). A current PMS within the organization defines areas of responsibilities and job roles. A traffic light system has been used for the performance in the field of three criteria, i.e. learning, development and performance.

Organization’s senior executives require being clear about the achievable objectives both on the basis of long and short term efficiency of PM system. The effective monitoring of Performance Management system is not possible by involving couple of hours, rather it takes time, understanding and performance expectation along with high performance culture in the organization (Ivythesis.typepad.com, 2015). Hence, organization have become more planned and strategic and planned towards their work on the other hand. It is evident that the raise of technologies and advanced methodologies has introduced numbers of challenges and for continuous improvement on by supplying human resources only for being a successful organization, rather it is much more important to align individual objectives with the PM focused delivery system (C U S T O M E R S U C C E S S, 2015). While it is required for goal setting and work as per the planning and establishment of performance measurements, it is not just require being mechanical, rather is it required to perform setting good goals and interpersonal skills by eliminating motivational issues. Naturalisation and Culture of the work group performs a crucial role in a certain ways to obey the HMR policies within B&Q. Hence, it has been possible for the employees within B&Q balance the work culture within the internal environment. There are knowledge have been gained in the area of taking different competitive strategies within B&Q; these experiences have been take place for the innovation, cost reduction and quality enhancement. Numbers of studies and researches have been conducted within the B&Q to uncover the theories on “influence of the network of relationships within which firms are working”.

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