Essay: HR Formative Assignment on Whole Foods Market

HR Formative Assignment on Whole Foods Market
Whole Foods Market, established in September of 1980, is an American supermarket chain specializing in natural, organic, preservative-free food. As of September 2015, the company has employed over 91,000 people across its 431 stores in North America and United Kingdom (www.usatoday.com) making it the largest natural-foods grocer in the United States.
What sets the company apart from other food grocers is their atmosphere of a ‘festive street-market with abundant displays of fresh food and tasting stations’(www.theeconomist.com), implying it is the company’s friendly approach towards customers that attracts people, among other factors,such as their claim to be the ‘dynamic leader in the quality foods business’ (wholefoodsmarket.com).According to their mission statement, which they call Declaration for Interdependence, they achieve this by ‘customer satisfaction, team member happiness and excellence and improving in the state of the environment’ (wholefoodsmarket.com).
The focus of this essay is going to be on Whole Foods’ human resource practices and the possible issues they encounter with Leadership and Motivation. The company claims it owes it’s great success to their employees (http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/careers), by allowing their authenticity and personality to shine through and their democratic leadership approach, suggesting that the workers at Whole Foods are free to make their own decisions to an extent and are their own motivators. According to a review based on 869 surveys, 81% of Whole Foods’ employees say that Whole Foods is a highly enjoyable place to work at (http://reviews.greatplacetowork.com/whole-foods-market). This claim has been supported by the Fortune100 magazine, who named Whole Foods as one of the greatest places to work at (www.beta.fortune.com).
LEADERSHIP AT WHOLE FOODS MARKET
DEFINITION AND OVERVIEW
Koontz and O’Donnell described leadership as the action of moulding individuals into a team (www.merriem-webster.com), however, the concept of leadership is slightly more complicated than that. Northouse (2004) provides a more detailed description of the term leadership claiming that leadership is ‘a process by which an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve common goals.’ He also mentioned that there are ‘almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people who try to define it.’ (www.pdfs.semanticscholar.org) This suggests that although there are clear outlines of what leadership is supposed to be, everyone interprets it differently, and thus, has a different and unique style of leadership.
WHOLE FOODS LEADERSHIP STYLE
Based on the information provided on their website
(www.wholefoods.com), Whole Foods seem to have implemented a democratic leadership with a hint of a Laissez-Faire—oriented approaches. Democratic leadership implies that team members have high participation within the company, are free to make their own decisions to a certain extent, and team members are usually treated equally and fairly. Laissez-Faire—oriented leadership approach, however,  places great emphasis on the employees within a company,rather than its leaders, meaning that the team is encouraged to determine the direction in which they take the company. While these are two slightly different approaches to leading a team, they do not contradict one another, but rather compliment each other really well. These approaches to leadership are thought to be among the main reasons for Whole Foods’ success.
As mentioned above, Whole Foods employees are given a lot of opportunities to make their own decisions within the company, and this includes their hiring process, meaning that they have the opportunity to select their potential colleagues.  Although store leaders do screen the candidates and recommend them for a job, the teams are given the exclusive right and power to approve new hires for full-time jobs. At Whole Foods, it takes two-thirds of the team to approve a candidate for a job after a 30 day trial, before they are offered a permanent position at the company(www.hospitalitynet.org).This shows that Whole Foods create an environment within their company that lets its employees feel appreciated and valued. Teams also meet on a regular basis to discuss new ideas, solve issues and celebrate each other’s contributions (www.wholefoodsmarket.com). This is an indicator that Whole Foods has, in fact, adopted a Laissez-Faire and democratic approaches to leadership, as based on this information, the employees are ‘pointed in the right direction’ however, the final decision is up to them. Research carried out by the Health and Safety Executive suggests that factors such as lack of control over aspects of the job, lack of involvement in decision making and aggressive management style can cause work-related stress and therefore affect company’s productivity (Cartwright and Cooper,2002). However, in the case of Whole Foods, this does not apply due, as most WF workers claim to be happy at their jobs, and therefore suggests that the employees must be responsible for the company’s great performance.
GOLEMAN’S VIEW ON LEADERSHIP
According to Daniel Goleman , there are three groups of competencies (Goleman, 1998): technical, cognitive and emotional, with emotional being ‘twice as important as the others’. Based on the information above, Whole Foods’ employees fall under the ‘emotional’ category which ‘is increasingly relevant to organizational development’(www.businessballs.com). This, once again, suggests that Whole Foods use their employees’ great relationships amongst each other to their advantage, as they seem to have brought the company to where it is now.
MOTIVATION AT WHOLE FOODS MARKET