Management and Leadership Development - Vodafone - Essay Example

?MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Introduction of Case Strategic human resource management has for long been used by companies the world over tomeet two major organizational goals, namely the needs of employees and promotion of company strategic goal (Holman, 2000). To this end, almost every company that has an agenda of growth embarks on one form of strategic human resource management or the other. In the United Kingdom for instance, almost all companies listed on the London Stock Exchange exhibit one form of theoretically known strategic human resource management plan or the other, and these have actually been major contributing factors to their strategic growth and development agenda (Avolio, 2005). In this paper, Vodafone Group is used as a key case study for the application of theories in strategic human resource management that have been discussed earlier under literature review. As part of the application action, the key leadership and management issues in Vodafone group are going to be discussed as well as a critical review of the management development of Vodafone and how this is a contributing factor to the company’s five ranking on the list of Top 10 British Companies listed by market capitalization (Economic Help, 2012). The review shall clearly outline what Vodafone group is actually doing in terms of strategic human resource management and assign a general judgement as to whether or not the company has strategic human resource management strategy at all. Thereafter, there shall be a comparative assessment of the place of the strategic human resource management of Vodafone with theory to practice (Margit, 2011), after which general recommendations shall be given on the way forward to achieving a more enhanced corporate growth. Key leadership and management issues Leadership and management issues come in different forms and types within the Vodafone Group (Marek, 2011). Establishing considering the fact that the Vodafone Group employs some 86,373 people means that the company has a relatively larger scope of human resource issues to deal with than other companies because literature has actually showed that the human resource intensity of companies increase with increasing employee size (Schein, 1985). Among the number leadership and management issues in Vodafone however, three main issues shall be given attention, which are hiring, mentoring, and incentives. These are selected over the others because of the place these have in theory as the pivotal human resource issues for strategic organisational growth and development (Veiko, 2009). What is more, in the Vodafone Annual Report 2012, the company is emphatic about the role of these three key leadership and management issues to the success of the company. As seen in literature earlier, at Vodafone, there is a conscious effort by the top hierarchy of the company to clearly define what leaders need to do about these three issues, as well as what managers need to do. This way, there is a perfect harnessing of the human resource competence of the company and functions are not seen as overlapping (Pasmore, 2009). Management Development In terms of the critical issues identified as hiring, mentoring and incentives, the company does a number of things from a management theoretical perspective rather than a leadership theoretical perspective. For instance there is always a conscious effort to working towards alignment within the work team rather than just defining the company values (Gluck, Kaufman and Walleck, 1982). Using hiring as a typical example, Vodafone Group has an entire human resource management team that is made up of representatives and officers from all other departments of the company. This way, it is easier to align the needs of the company from all departments into a collective need of the company so that the hiring process will cater for the larger human capital inadequacies of the company (Waters, 1995). In effect, the hiring process at Vodafone Group is one that is done for corporate Vodafone and not one that is done for individual departments of the company. This notwithstanding, hiring at Vodafone cannot be said to be thoroughly perfect without possible fixes and adjustments. This is because as much as it is important for any hiring that takes place within the company to meet the collective strategic needs of the company, it is also important to recognise that customers will often deal with specific components of the company rather than with the company as a collective entity (Raivo, 2010). To this end, it would be advisable if there were two hiring outfits within the organisation, one to be responsible for inter-departmental hiring and the other to be responsible for intra-departmental hiring. In using this model, hiring will first be started at the department levels based on the immediate needs of the departments in question; after which shortlisted applicants will be involved by the main hiring team to look at final issues of corporate compatibility in candidates before landing on ultimate selections (Wexley and Baldwin, 1986). The other leadership and management issue of mentoring also goes on quite well at Vodafone Group and has been recommended by many researchers who have had a chance of studying strategic human resource management at Vodafone as part of their case study projects (Simon, 2010). Mentoring has been used as a means of giving employees a hands-on orientation of the roles they are expected to perform within corporate Vodafone (Hernez-Broome and Hughes, 2004). Mentoring has also been fused with monitoring as a means of continuous assessment and feedback on the progress of workers. As part of the literature reviewed, it was established that managers have a characteristic of communicating the values and making them a reality (Smith and Debrah, 2000) and it is for this reason that mentoring is in place. This is because through mentoring, managers serve as examples and models of perfection rather than creators of shared values of culture (Madise, 2007). Mentorship take place at Vodafone through the assignment of newly employed staff to senior executives for a period of 3 months to act as mentees. Even though this has yielded results in most cases, a more pragmatic approach that made mentorship a permanent component of strategic human resource management at Vodafone would have been more effective. For example, mentorship could be made a permanent part of employees so that at every point in time, a junior worker will be having a senior executive that he or she looks up to (Erkki, 2011.) Still on the critical areas of strategic human resource management, Vodafone has always ensured that incentives are part of the corporate human resource provisions of the company (Snell and Dean, 1992). At Vodafone, incentives are seen as a collection of all job entitlements that are due to employees for the quantum of work that they deliver. This is guided by both national standards for rewards and the company’s internal arrangements on incentives (Bartol and Martin, 1994). As part of the national standards, there is always a clear definition of the remunerations available to employees at the point of advertising for various job positions. But after placement is done, the company offers a number of internally based incentive packages that are aimed at identifying specific employees who exhibit specific working attitudes. Some of these attitudes are exceptional display of customer relations, punctuality, regularity, interpersonal relationship, over-time and the number of times a worker is named the employee of the week (Tarvo, 2007). In theory, this practice has been identified to be effective for the promotion of healthy competition among workers. This may somewhat be seen as a deviation from the general norm of strategic human resource management whereby there is expected to be a proactive management of people (Tarmo, 2009). This is because this procedure used by Vodafone seeks to give attention to selected employees, who in the view and opinion of management give the company better human capital value (Mumford and Gold, 2004). SHRM Strategy As far as strategic human resource management strategy is concerned, Vodafone can be said to be using a formal model that is clearly stated as followers: “An inclusive culture and environment is one which respects, values, celebrates and makes the most of the individual differences we each bring to Vodafone, to the benefit of our customers, employees, shareholders, business partners and the wider communities in which we operate” (Vodafone Annual Report 2012). This means that there is a core strategic policy undertaken by the company to ensure that the human resource base of the company is seen as critical stakeholders for developmental growth. Vodafone indeed seeks its human resource base as the engine of growth, rather than agents of growth (Newkirk-Moore and Bracker, 1998). In theory, companies that see their human resource as agents of growth do not really integrate the human resource into the core strategic planning of the company (Ashkanasy, Wilderom and Peterson, 2000). Consequently, there is hardly any guarantee that any proper attention will be given to the needs of employees, thereby breaking down the key provisions of human resource management. Again, companies that see human resource as agent of growth rather than engine of growth see employees as a group of people under a contractual agreement to get a piece of work delivered for a defined sum of reward. Consequently, the attention is always on how well these agents deliver. But in the case of Vodafone, the human resource is made a stakeholder of growth and therefore sees its self part of any successes and failures that are recorded (Doh, 2003). In effect, the human resource management strategy always ensures that the needs of workers are met as per the theoretical provisions of the strategic human resource management plan so that the human resource could be more effective at post (Boone and Kurtz, 1999). Conclusion and Recommendation Several useful factors have been identified about the strategic human resource management in place at Vodafone Group. Clearly, Vodafone has every justification to include human resource management as one of the key strategic growth indicators that has been the company through its successive years of growth in the communication industry (Cumming, Molloy and Glen, 1977). Even though several aspects of impactions were found with the implementation of key areas of theory, it can be generally concluded that the company is indeed actualising theory in practice as it makes a number of attempts to ensure that as far as hiring, mentoring and incentives are concerned, an integrated approach is used to bring all hands on deck into achieving the goals of the company (Devanna, Fombrun and Tichy, 1984). Into the future, there are a number of things that the company needs to do as far as human resource management is concerned. It is recommended that the company continues its policy of clearly identifying the roles of leadership as compared to management in the application of human resource management theories. But more importantly, it is recommended that a competency-based management system is integrated into the existing human resource planning of the company (Dachler and Wilpert, 1978). 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