Different Management Structures Of Ikea

MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE OF IKEA

IKEA Organizational Structure, 2018

Q2. Difference between roles and characteristics of a leader and a manager

Leadership is defined as act of influencing and leading an individual or a group towards achieving firm's objectives. Leaders in IKEA achieve this by conveying firm's vision to the organisation's employees. They are also responsible towards motivating members of a company to unify their maximum efforts towards accomplishing overall tasks.

Roles of a Leader:

• Motivation: biggest role leaders of IKEA play is motivating employees. They adopt different methods and implement different strategies to motivate workforce. These strategies can be increase in their salaries, promotions or incentives which would contribute in ensuring employees' commitment towards firm.
• Link Between management and workers: Leaders establish a link between upper management and workforce of company (Drake and Spinler, 2013). They provide workforce with information about company and decisions taken by upper management of organisation.
• Adaptive: Leaders at IKEA must be accustomed to change. They must be agile and flexible to adapt themselves with ongoing changes in business environment and develop strategies accordingly.
• Initiation: Leaders are responsible for initiating action and take effective decisions about tasks that are needed to be performed by the workforce.

Management refers to planning, organising, directing and controlling activities of various functional units of an organisation to increase its efficiency and effectiveness. Management in IKEA is necessary in an organisation in achieving its overall objectives. It ensures optimum utilisation of a firm's resources and helps in conducting firm's operations in an appropriate and profitable manner.

Roles of a Manager:

• Planning: All plans about working of IKEA are formed by its managers. They plan policies, strategies and ways in which tasks can be achieved and profitability of this firm could increase.
• Organising: Managers organise activities in a systematic manner to remove ambiguity and enhance organisation's performance (Gimenez, Sierra and Rodon, 2012). y balances company's resources in a way that they could achieve their maximum potential.
• Directing: Managers supervises and directs employees towards set goals of the company. This allows employees to increase their efficiencies.
• Controlling: IKEA managers also control activity and resources of firm and evaluate these activities to make sure everything goes as per set goals.

IKEA is world's largest furniture retail company founded in 1943. It focuses on conducting its operations in eco-friendly ways and adopts a modernistic approach in designing different types of furnitures and appliances. The company previously adopted hierarchical organisational structure. Due to rigidity in operations, and ineffective communication system, firm decided to restructure their organisation in which managers and leaders played a crucial role. Managers in IKEA are ones who plans, directs and controls functions and operations of a company. Whereas IKEA leaders are people who crafts an inspiring vision for an organisation, influence and motivates members of firm in achieving that vision and builds teams that can effectively achieve objectives of a company (Ageron, Gunasekaran and Spalanzani, 2012). There are notable differences between roles of leaders and managers which are as follows: