Management and Leadership Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Management and Leadership Development - Essay Example 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 ke y 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 dep artments 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