Uniqlo Leadership Styles

Executive Summary

The purpose of this study focuses mainly on finding out how leadership’s style in UNIQLO is applied. The previous studies are classified the type of leadership’s style. As a result focused the four aspects including leadership style’s characteristic, leadership style’s view, satisfaction working environment and decision making involvement in order to analysis and understand the management structure in UNIQLO’s store.

Besides, the research findings reveal that the most important aspect most of the interviewees are concerned of is what kind of leadership’s style they would prefer.  According to the findings, we are to provide some suggestions to how to improve the leadership management training in UNIQLO’s operations in Hong Kong.

1. Project background

UNIQLO is one of the leading global brands of Japanese casual wear. In Hong Kong, it sees the number of stores increased to a total of 25 at the end of August 2015 (UNIQLO, 2016).  According to the Japan Time News (2015,online), UNIQLO sales have bumped up 47 percent of 168 billion yen that is more than expected gains from its stores in the PRC, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan.

Normally, productivity of staff is closely related to profits earned for a company. Hence, UNIQLO devoted to boost performance at individual stores by feature “local-store employees”, and encourage in-store staff to work as a team with their store manager to create their own brand-building stores. This way encourages long-term, dedicated commitment among employees by creating a local store environment. In other words, store manager playing a critical role to create a store environment that navigating and motivating the groups to implement successful sales activities, apart from managing daily operation such as product display, stock control (DeHoratius. N and Raman, A., 2003).

In order to achieve the sales goals of company, each store manager must develop a leadership style based on their personality, the people they lead, and the nature of the sales activity.Leadership is the integral parts of system, subject to the forces whereas affect the system. They perform (or cause to be performed) certain tasks or functions that are essential if the group is to accomplish its purposes (Gardner, J. 1990).

Effective leadership could increase employees productively on top of overall performance. Goleman, J. (2000, online) also reported that leadership style was responsible for a massive 30% of bottom-line profit.UNIQLO, to be a famous brand in Hong Kong, their store managers play a critically important role in ensuring a continually profitable and successful business.

5. Critical literature review

This section presents the theoretical concepts in the context of toward research objectives.

5.1 Leadership style

5.1.1 Transactional leadership

Transactional leadership is an approach which focuses on the role of supervision, organization and group performance.  Leaders encourage the followers’ compliance through both rewards and punishments. Thus, Performance reviews are the most common way to judge employee performance. This type of leader is suitable for maintaining routine by facilitating group performance and managing individual performance. There are two factors below to form transactional leadership.