Question

In 2008, facing a serious shortage of leadership-ready employees at the store management level, Walmart decided to recruit from the U.S. military. The company sent recruiters to military job fairs and hired 150 junior military officers, pairing them with store mentors to learn on the job. The result: Walmart claims that it’s been able to bring in world-class leaders who were ready to take over once they had learned the retail business that Walmart could easily teach them. Other organizations that have heavily recruited from the military in recent years include GE, Home Depot, Lowe’s, State Farm Insurance, Merck, and Bank of America. It’s not really surprising to see companies turn to the military for leadership potential. A long tradition of books and seminars advises leaders to think like military leaders ranging from Sun Tzu to Norman Schwarzkopf. And military veterans do have a variety of valuable skills learned through experience. General David Petraeus notes, “Tell me anywhere in the business world where a 22 or 23-year-old is responsible for 35 or 40 other individuals on missions that involve life and death . . . They’re under enormous scrutiny, on top of everything else. These are pretty formative experiences. It’s a bit of a crucible-like experience that they go through.” Military leaders are also used to having to make due in less than optimal conditions, negotiate across cultures, and operate under extreme stress. However, they do have to relearn some lessons from the service. Some may not be used to leading someone like an eccentric computer programmer who works strange hours and dresses like a slob, but who brings more to the company’s bottom line than a conventional employee would. Indeed, in some companies like Google, there is nothing like the chain of command military leaders are used to. Still, most forecasts suggest there will be an ample supply of battle-tested military leaders ready to report for corporate duty in the near future, and many companies are eager to have them.

note; After reading this case what will be this case summary of leadership theories and behavioral theories?

Answer 1

With reference to the above context, generally summarising the leadership and behavioral theories. As we know that leadership and behavior is corelated qualities. It varies from human to human. When we consider the behavior of a person, its the action of taken by a human being in a particular situation under certain conditions towards others. Leadership behavior is mainly concentrating the behavior of leaders in a particular situation towards others.

A leader cannot always think like others in the group, he/she has to forecast the near situation should make the decisions and take actions actions accordingly. A leader should lead his group in any negative circumstances with available resources. He has to guide his team in a proper way and he should act as a light in the darkeness. All his teammates will be immitating his action and thus giving the output. So if a leader acts in much positive attitude, then his team also will be motivated and will try to convert all the negative situations into a postive phase and thus could provide maximum.

In the above scenario, appointing millitary personnels for running a retail business is the necessity of the present environment. Comparing to the ordinary business executives or officers an army personnel have extra ordinary mind set and will be able to work in a stressfull atmosphere and thus to attain the result without compromising the firm's standards. A millitary personnel is much more disciplined and is very much selforiented by the training received the army department which leads the outlet to reach its maximum success also they can understand and implement acting in a group without blaming each other. One more important factor in hiring the millitary personnel is that they can work without any selfish attitude, they are ready to give selfless service and this will be useful for the owner of the outlet.

There are certain behavioral leadership theories which are scientifically designed by many of the experts - there are two theories considered as important among them. They are 1) Theories proposed by the Michigan University to identify a leader's behavior to provide high performance and also satisfying the whole team 2) the studies conducted by the Ohio University to observe the leader's behavior in various situations.

Studies conducted by Michigan University:- In this perspective two types of studies were concentrated :- a) Performance oriented and 2) Employee's satisfaction oriented. In this category a leader is supposed to behave in two sytles one to get maximum out by increasing the performance and the other one by satisfying the employees in the team. But this itself may not be always possible. In practical life, always performance may not be achieved by getting the employee's satisfied, in some cases the satisfaction may not be measured as an individual cause rather it should be considered as a group's satisfaction and performance outcome.

Studies conducted by Ohio Univeristy:- In this study, the data were collected by giving two types of questionnaire to the leaders. Thru this questionnaire mainly two are important areas are covered :- commanting leader-subordinate relationship and the behavior between leader and subordinates who consider there should be a warm and close relationship between each other. This study concluded that a leader shall have a capability of working in a group rather than commanding he/she has to support the entire team and at the same time a leader should make team members to complete the work.

Considering the above theories and the case study mentioned in the question, much more modifications are expected to happen in the role of acquiring a perfect leader, if we get a best leader in all aspects then the half work is done.

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