MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP PAPER

Management and Leadership Paper

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Management and Leadership (Wal-Mart)

Human nature is the most complex thing. It is difficult to understand the nature of a human being and what is even more difficult is managing behavior of human beings. For smooth and lucrative operation of business it is so vital for an organization to manage behavior of its personnel. Organization behavior management is an indispensable function for an organization. Department of organization behavior management perform variegated tasks. This department actually analyzes and manages human behavior. It deals with wide variety of topics. Change management, leadership, teams, groups and learning are few of the topics that come under the umbrella of organization behavior. The aim and objective of this paper is to talk about few of the aspect of the organizational behavior in an organization. The organization that is selected for this paper is Wal-Mart and the organizational behavior aspects that this paper discusses are leadership and management.

Difference between Management and Leadership

There is a thin line of difference between leadership and management. Many scholars and practitioners have made an attempt to clearly describe difference between these two fields. This thing can best be described by focusing on what are the elements of these two fields that compliment and support each other instead of seeking the differences between these two. One thing that is common in both leadership and management is that both deals with working with other people and working towards attainment of goals (Northouse 2007, 17). Nature of the relationship is one aspect that separates management from leadership. Management involves more authoritative relationship that flows from top to down. On the other hand, leadership involves more influential relationship between the members. In the case of leadership, the leader influences his or her followers and also cause influence on overall process of leadership and in turn followers also cause influence on leaders and process of leadership (Adler 1997, 25).

Leadership method at Wal-Mart was evidenced by Chairman S. Robson Walton. At the seminar Walton was conferred onstage by Steve Forbes. Walton said it is the job of managers to "listen to clients, hear to clients, and hear to customers" and thereby set up a service essence for the whole company. Walton took over his dad Sam's domain in 1992, when Wal-Mart was managing $55 billion in yearly whole, nearly all of it in the U.S. Today Wal-Mart is an international monster, with sales of more than $400 billion (Jones 2006, pp. 1).

Rob Walton's secret is that he does not imagine being Sam Walton, who based Wal-Mart in 1962. Sam was an archetypal entrepreneur. Rob chooses to be the humble-servant leader. Under Rob Walton's leadership his business has heard well--even to its numerous critics and prospered.

Leadership and management at the Wal-Mart refer both to those entities that does the leading and to the process of leading. Leadership has been centralized and is somewhat contentious in the method of the movement of most organizations. Despite any assertions of contrary in the functions of leadership, there ...