Assignment 3 - Under Armour Paper

Assignment 2: Professional Development Program Proposal

Chet Walker

Strayer University

Professor Wanda Tillman

BUS 520 – Leadership and Organizational Behavior

Spring 2019

Leadership and Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior is the application of knowledge on how people and groups act while in organizations. It involves an interpretation of the relationship between individual people and their organization concerning the whole organization and the entire social system. Studying organizational behavior helps people to build a better relationship through achieving personal objectives, social objectives and corporate objectives. Organizational Behavior comprises of several issues such as change, human behavior, teams and leadership among others. Other aspects such as organizational culture determine the type of leadership, communication and group dynamics within the organization. Corporate culture is what employees perceive as the quality of work life which determines the degree of their motivation. The final employees’ outcomes are personal satisfaction, performance and personal growth as well as development. In the paper, I will analyse how leadership and organizational behavior in Under Armour Inc. influence the current situation in the company. Using emotional intelligence, I will develop a solution to the company’s challenges.

Leadership and senior management behavior determine the success of any organization (Mencl et al., 2016). Currently, Under Armour has been experiencing challenges in its top management and leadership. Although the founder and CEO Kevin Plank remain confident on the company’s long-term growth, Under Armour’s sales are decreasing as competition increases from the leading companies. Among the challenging issues that Under Armour is going through include senior executives leaving their positions. In 2015 COO and CFO Brad Dickerson resigned, while in 2016 Henry Stafford, chief merchandising officer and Robin Thurston, the chief digital officer resigned. In 2017, two senior executives left including marketing chief Andrew Donkin and the Senior Vice President in women’s and youth’s category (Lieber, 2018). These challenges have been contributed to by troubling workplace culture and poor leadership. Failure to maintain the best top management seems to lead the company in the wrong direction hence the need to find a solution to safe Under Armour.

Under Armour has been termed as an explosively growing company in the footwear and apparel market. However, their growth has started to decline especially in the last three years. The anticipated growth of 28% in 2018 was not attained as a result of poor leadership and workplace relationships. In North America, where the company has the largest market share, Under Armour is facing challenges with Adidas, Nike and Lululemon Athletica soaring on that market (Lieber, 2018). The issue of fading popularity in North America is an issue that Under Armour needs to address effectively. Other challenging issues that the company is facing in inventory that is, people not buying what Under Armour is selling. Revenue, profits and net income has decreased in recent years. This can be addressed by improving marketing and promotions, supply chain management or UA managing its inventories better to gets its goods off the shelves. Lastly, the company needs to address the top management shakeup for the stability and direction of the overall company’s strategic plans.

Emotional Intelligence and Motivation

Emotional intelligence measures a person’s ability to identify and manage their emotions as well as those for others. As intelligence quotient measure intelligence and cognitive skills such as learning and understand, emotional intelligence measure emotional ability. Precisely, people with high emotional intelligence can understand their psychological state and manage stress and depression better that people with high intelligence quotient. Ideally, it is more than just being smart to be successful in life. An individual with high emotional intelligence finds it easy to form and maintain interpersonal relationship and fit into the group situations. Emotional intelligence is a complex issue which involves different external and internal factors impacting our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. It is crucial to consider self-motivation about emotional intelligence because it affects our ability to motivate other individuals (Mathew & Gupta, 2015). Emotional intelligence is divided into social and personal competences broadly splitting between personal and interpersonal skills.

Motivation is an individual’s drive to improve and achieve, commitment to their goals, initiative or the readiness to act on opportunities and being optimism and resilient. Motivation is one of the personal skills as well as self-regulation and self-awareness. Emotional intelligence helps people to be motivated and love what they do and doing what they love. Loving what you do keeps you motivated, while this motivation drives people to work harder and produce high-quality work. It also referred to as intrinsic motivation. It is the kind of motivation that comes from inside and fuels the desire to solve problems and overcome challenges to produce high-quality work (Mathew & Gupta, 2015). Extrinsic motivation entails motivation that comes from external factors to achieve goals. These factors include pay rise, bonus checks, workforce engagement, time off and the threat of job loss.

Under Armour, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations have an impact on the company’s success and current challenges. The emotional intelligence of top senior management officials has significant impacts on the well-being and success of the company. With a positive attitude at work, people are willing and highly adaptable to change. As a result, these will enhance good reputation, reduce absenteeism and improve performance and profit. People with high emotional intelligence will be able to understand others and motivated to overcome challenges (Mathew & Gupta, 2015). Even with the challenging relationship between CEO Kevin Plank and top senior management, having high emotional intelligence can help advance workplace relationships. More so, workforce engagement, that is allowing staff and management to contribute to decision making is crucial for solving Under Armour’s challenges. Employers are responsible for employees’ intrinsic motivation. When employees are intrinsically motivated, the organization also reaps the reward.

Emotional Intelligence and Social Skills and Decision Making

Social skills in the context of emotional intelligence refer to skills which need to handle and influence other individual’s emotions effectively. Emotional intelligence starts by understanding your emotions or self-awareness, having the ability to manage them and using those emotions to achieve goals. When a person can understand and manage their feelings, they can understand the emotions and feeling of others (empathy) and influence them (social skills) (Mathew & Gupta, 2015). Social skills in the context of emotional intelligence include communication skills, leadership skills, rapport, change management skills, persuasion skills and team-working skills (Mencl et al., 2016). Emotional intelligence is also crucial in making effective decisions in any organization. All decision-making processes in any organization have emotional and cognitive components. Various aspects of emotional intelligence contribute to productivity and success in the workplace (Sumathy et al., 2015). Decision-makers can maximise on self-management skills in establishing a consistent record of achievement as well as emotional control and earn trust for internal and external constituents.

As we noted above, emotional intelligence is essential in both developing social skills and decision making. It is crucial for leaders in any organization to have high emotional intelligence. Leaders should first understand their emotion and know how to manage those emotions. This makes it easy to understand others and be able to influence them. Having emotional intelligence among leadership, senior management and other employees makes it possible to communicate effectively, work in teams, manage conflicts and be persuasive and influencing people to adopt changes. More importantly, emotional intelligence social skills such as self-awareness and the core competencies of empathy, organizational awareness and service orientation of decision-makers will judge or evaluate the impact of their decision and also manner through which decisions are made (Sumathy et al., 2015). Decision making influences the effectiveness of accomplishing goals. Understanding other people’s emotions and considering team members in decision making impact the success and improve the group’s performance and productivity.

Effective Team

Teams should be motivated towards attaining common goals, recognizing small victories, learning from mistakes and acknowledging how each team member can improve on the ways to success. More importantly, it is the presence of a confident leader dedicated to helping team members to understand individual roles as well as communicating and upholding team vision. The core attributes of a team include having the team’s clear vision impacted by the company’s mission and offering direction to achieving common goals (Cascio, 2015). Also, the success of a team is influenced by an inspiring leader who communicates their team’s mission, lead humbly and accept feedback and criticism. Inspiring leaders encourage employee development and give teams credits (Mencl et al., 2016). More so, organizations need to cooperate and coordinate to achieve goals and objectives. Team cooperation helps leverage on each team member’s strength and developing a strong team. Lastly, constructive communication is crucial for the success of any team. Regarding Under Armour challenges and issues, these four core characteristics of a group are useful for the company’s success.

Reward System

Under Armour should invest in annual bonuses to motivate employees and retain highly experienced employees in the company. Further, employees should be promotion will be essential to ensure the company develops and grows in the right direction according to their vision and mission. More so, personal touch is essential to encourage innovation as employees will feel to be part of the management. Personal touch should come alongside employee involvement in the contribution of ideas (Mathew & Gupta, 2015). Employees are highly motivated when involved in the process of new product development. Lastly, the leadership should ensure no discrimination of any employee based on sex, origin, age, religion or status (Cascio, 2015). Recognizing every employee regardless of their gender or age keeps employees motivated and encourages interacting with each other and building trust among them.

References

Cascio, W. F. (2015). Managing human resources. McGraw-Hill.

Lieber, C. (2018). Under Armour won’t let employees expense “adult entertainment,” limos, or gambling anymore. Vox. Retrieved on May 10, from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/7/18068378/under-armour-kevin-plank-workplace-culture

Mathew, M., & Gupta, K. S. (2015). Transformational leadership: Emotional intelligence. SCMS Journal of Indian Management, 12(2), 75.

Mencl, J., Wefald, A. J., & van Ittersum, K. W. (2016). Transformational leader attributes: interpersonal skills, engagement, and well-being. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 37(5), 635-657.

Sumathy, L., Madhavi, C., & Felix, A. J. W. (2015). Influence of emotional intelligence on decision making by leaders. American International Journal of Social Science, 4(1), 134-140.