CASE STUDY

Case Study: Alpha Supermarkets

Case Study: Alpha Supermarkets

Introduction

In today's society global interdependence and globalization has created new contexts for small, medium, and large organizations. With the growing global interdependence, it has become clear that in order to progress towards better quality and growth, organizations need to put in huge amount of effort especially in terms of human resources. Today, organizations are required to take into account that it is significant to have effective leadership and human resource management that help in maintaining employee engagement and eventually increase in the profits (Macaleer, 2007, 15). In this paper, I am going to discuss two common but very important questions related to employee engagement, employee performance, customer service, and its impact on organizational performance. The purpose of this paper is to let readers know about the importance of effective leadership, psychological contract, employee engagement, efficient customer services, and management of human resources. This paper also discusses how all these major elements affect the productivity and performance of organization. In addition this paper aims to aid managers in determining where to put their efforts to have most impact on organization's performance.

Question # 1

Alpha Supermarket is one of the successful and largest supermarket chains of UK. Alpha has several stores across the country which are operated large number of staff. Though the supermarket industry in last few years has seen very little growth, but Alpha has successfully increased its market share because of its low price strategy and improved customer services. Alpha is a highly centralized and an organization with clear policies and routines, one would hardly expect to find low level of variation in terms of exercise of management discretion at store level. The company conducted a survey in which there were some showing above average performance and some below average performance this was because of wide variation in the employee satisfaction with certain policies of HR such as influence over the job and management of manages and variation in more general attitudes such as commitment, satisfaction, and motivation. The main factors behind the poor and good performance of stores are their employees and their commitment, motivation, and satisfaction level. The performance of an employee and organization is always linked to the type of leadership and how organizations engage them to have required outcomes. For example in Store C of Alpha Supermarket there has been lack of effective leadership in fact in entire organization because management has that thing in mind that Alpha is centralized and an organization with strict rule therefore it is not important to put much efforts on the leading side or employee engagement. The study conducted on stores of Alpha claimed that store C have poor perception of the way senior mangers carry out their people management role whereas other store's section managers said that their senior managers are good at responsidng to their suggestion which ultimately have positive impact on their performance which can also been seen from the data given in the ...