Portraying an Organization’s Foundations of Leadership – United Parcel Service
United Parcel Service (UPS) is a Georgia-based multinational corporation headquartered in Georgia. Although the company initially began as a local US-based company, it has since expanded its operations and operates in about 200 countries. UPS also operates one of the largest airline fleets, which delivers overseas shipments. The company’s revenue has been on an upward trend due to the increasing demand for shipment services.
Mission
The company’s mission is to ‘grow global business by ensuring customers’ logistical needs are served while seeking excellence and stellar customer services (United Parcel Service, n.d.).
Vision
The company’s vision is to ‘help customers find more sustainable ways of delivering packages, create efficient connections, and take action by giving back to the community’ (United Parcel Service, n.d.).
Leadership Skills and Attributes
One of the primary goals of UPS Company is to attain a competitive advantage in the market. Today, the parcel delivery market is concentrated; hence, most companies are seeking to attain a competitive advantage. A company’s leadership has to align its employees with the company’s vision, mission, and objectives to attain competitive advantage (Sethuraman & Suresh, 2014). One of the many ways United Parcel Service helps employees attain company objectives is by ensuring they have the resources they need to accomplish their tasks. This leadership style has gone a long way in motivating employees to give their best while at work.
Another key element of leadership visible at United Parcel Service is positivity. While implementing an organization’s goals and objectives, it is not uncommon to encounter challenges such as insufficient resources, tools, amenities, technologies, and other overall working environment conditions (Sethuraman & Suresh, 2014). Ineffective leaders would complain about the absence of such facilities and resort to blame games, and this may potentially discourage their followers. However, the case is different at UPS, where the leaders operate with a positive attitude. Embracing positivity in all organizational aspects encourages the rest of the team to be positive about all tasks and responsibilities.
Another fundamental component of successful leadership at UPS is motivation. Motivation at the workplace manifests in the form of an enabling working environment, pay enhancement, incentives, and rewards for a job well done. Once employees are motivated, their social, biological, and cognitive capabilities are activated to bring positive change. United Parcel Service offers gradual step-by-step learning that enables employees to attain career progression and promotion. Employees at the company also benefit from paid holidays, weekends, and healthcare insurance benefits. Motivational approaches are key in arousing interest and enthusiasm among employees to implement specific job duties.
Also, effective communication is core to UPS’s leadership strategy. Effective communication becomes relevant when leaders are required to pass instructions, explain goals, support employees, and coordinate job duties (Sethuraman & Suresh, 2014). To that end, leaders ought not to discriminate against employees based on their creed, race, age, or religion. At UPS, leaders seek to ensure that communication befits the situation being addressed, which is characteristic of the contingency era. Besides, there is an open-door policy whereby every employee is at liberty to voice their concerns without victimization. Effective communication makes all employees feel important, hence giving their best to achieve their potential and organizational goals.
Strategy and Tactics
As per the UPS official website, the company implements a customer-first strategic approach. A customer-first strategy requires companies to stay in constant touch with customers through telephone calls, email communication, and discussion forums to understand their needs (Edinger‐Schons et al., 2019). Also, technological advancement through the internet facilitated web-based communication with customers. United Parcel Service has customers overseas, hence the need to leverage the internet to keep in touch with its customers (United Parcel Service, n.d.). According to UPS, ease and speed are key customer concerns. The company fulfils customer needs by maintaining a global smart logistics company to ensure flawless contact.
Another pillar of UPS’s advancement is the innovation-driven strategy. The company allocates more assets to organizational sectors likely to bolster its competitive advantage and improve bottom-line results (United Parcel Service, n.d.). UPS utilizes tech capabilities provided by other better-performing companies to improve their performance. The strategy is based on their primary goal: attaining a competitive advantage.
Organizational Culture
Based on the above arguments, United Parcel Service embraces the adhocracy culture. An organization that runs on the adhocracy culture seeks to disrupt the status quo by continually innovating new ways of doing things (Hamzah et al., 2022). An underlying concept behind the adhocracy culture is that customer needs are dynamic and keep changing with time. Therefore, a company must understand the customers’ needs to ensure their satisfaction and loyalty. It is also equally important to understand the underlying forces influencing customer needs to respond effectively and stay ahead of competitors (Hamzah et al., 2022). As stated earlier, UPS focuses on delivering what matters to its customers. The company leverages digital platforms to understand its customers’ needs.
In addition, the adhocracy culture emphasizes risk-taking, adaptation, and experimentation. With the adhocracy culture, employees are encouraged to collect information on behalf of their company (Hamzah et al., 2022). Since UPS’s goals revolve around creating a competitive advantage, the company is eager to collect customer information that may help it improve its processes toward fulfilling customer needs. Besides, UPS relies on its partner firms to collect information on how they can improve internal processes to better fulfil customer needs.
Recommendations
To ensure effective implementation of the adhocracy culture, an ad-hoc committee must be formed that collects information on emerging issues to guide innovation implementation. Since information is collected from different quarters, having an ad-hoc committee considering all options will be useful. Also, there is a need to tie adhocracy implementation with organizational goals. To that end, the organization ought to create an enabling environment where every employee, including the delivery person, can offer their viewpoint.
References
Edinger‐Schons, L. M., Lengler‐Graiff, L., Scheidler, S., Mende, G., & Wieseke, J. (2019). Listen to the voice of the customer—First steps towards stakeholder democracy. Business Ethics: A European Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12252
Hamzah, M. I., Othman, A. K., Fikry, A., & Abdullah, M. Z. (2022). The interaction effects of adhocracy culture, work experience on information acquisition and job performance of bank salespeople. Journal of Financial Services Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41264-022-00166-9
Sethuraman, K., & Suresh, J. (2014). Effective Leadership Styles. International Business Research, 7(9), 165–172. https://doi.org/10.5539/ibr.v7n9p165
United Parcel Service (UPS). (n.d.). Home | About UPS. About UPS-US. https://about.ups.com/us/en/home.html
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Question 
Portraying an Organization’s Foundations of Leadership – United Parcel Service
For this assignment, choose a local organization and research its foundations of leadership. Then, prepare a WHITE PAPER highlighting key theories underlining this organization’s culture and how these theories lead to certain best practices. Include examples to support your findings. Next, determine areas of improvement for leadership to consider. Remember, a WHITE PAPER promotes a certain aspect and influences current and prospective decisions at all levels.
Be sure to include information on the following:
Leadership Skills and Attributes
Mission
Vision
Strategy and Tactics
Organizational Culture
Your findings will be utilized as the basis for the Memo in the following assignment.
Length: 3-4 pages, not including title or reference pages
References: Include a minimum of 3 scholarly resources.