1.

Leadership theories in Vinamilk and Nutifood (P1)

1.1. Leadership theory in Vinamilk
I interviewed Mr. Hoang N.Q working in the Marketing department of Vinamilk about Mrs.
Mai Kieu Lien. She is the CEO of Vinamilk and has more than 40 years of experience in
leading Vinamilk to reach the world. During her dedication to the profession, she has been
honored with many awards at domestic and abroad, such as such as the First-class Labor
Medal (2006), The Excellent Businesswomen (2014) by Corporate Governance Asia, the
Nikkei and New Zealand prizes for all of her brilliant contributions, the honored "Lifetime
Achievement Award'' (2018), and the "Top 50 Most Powerful Women of Vietnam'' (2019)
announced by Forbes (Vinamilk, 2021).

Mrs. Mai employs transactional leadership theory. In detail, transactional leadership theory
refers to a leadership style that utilizes rewards and punishments to motivate and direct
followers (Cherry, 2022). According to Cherry (2022), transactional leaders are individuals
who monitor their followers carefully to enforce rules, reward success and punish failure.

Mai Kieu Lien uses transactional leadership through utilizing rewards and punishments to
influence worker performance. Specifically, she focuses on tasks and short-term goals of
Vinamilk. Therefore, Vinamilk employees will be rewarded when they volunteer to work
overtime for the benefit of the company and the company will give them a bonus based on
their performance when they achieve the set goals. Additionally, the reward of Vinamilk
employees will be based on their performance evaluation criteria including scope of
responsibility, capacity and experience (Vinamilk, 2015). Not only that, Mrs. Mai also set out
outstanding benefits offered by the company to employees such as the Health Insurance
program for employees and their relatives of managers, support for studying and working
conditions to take care of their health and create conditions for employees to work more
efficiently. Regarding punishment, Mrs. Mai also set out specific penalties of Vinamilk for
employees who fail to complete their tasks or violate internal regulations affecting the
interests of the company, including measures such as warning, salary reduction, suspension
from work, or even termination of the labor contract depending on the severity of the
violation and the specific situation (VnExpress, 2018). Thereby this stimulates the personal
interests of employees based on the reward waiting for them if they perform well as well as
motivates employees to work hard so as not to be punished.
Using transactional leadership theory reveals both pros and cons. The benefit of this kind of
leadership is that this style of leadership is good for motivating employees, it can help
employees increase their confidence and responsibility, and it is an effective leadership style
that encourages employees to do their best to achieve their goals. Improved direction Leaders
connect each subordinate's standard operating procedures, aims, and objectives with the
organization's mission and goals. They employ rewards and penalties to get the desired
outcomes. This form's drawback is it is difficult to find a reward that will satisfy all
employees. Different people are motivated by different factors. Some people think that
money is a kind of reward, some people want more holidays and leisure time, and some
people need a lot of subsidies, such as insurance, reimbursement for work and so on (Yang
and Zhu, 2022).

1.2. Leadership theory in Nutifood

I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Pham.K.D., working in the HRM department of
Nutrifood about Mrs. Tran Thi Le. Mrs. Tran has been the CEO of Nutrifood since 2000.
With many years of working with Nutrifood's senior leader, she and her business has gone
through many crises and also achieved certain successes such as The Company achieved an
average growth of 237% per year and was listed on the stock exchange from 2000 to 2007,
and became “Vietnam's No 1 Baby Milk Brand” thanks to its NutiFood GrowPLUS+
(APEA, 2020).

Mrs. Tran employs transformational leadership theory. Transformational leadership theory

means a collaborative approach where the leader collaborates with followers to discover
necessary adjustments and produce outstanding results (Campos, 2020). Therefore,
transformational leaders are individuals who are able to act in the interest of their followers
seeking to work with them to attain the set vision and foster the creativity of their
subordinates.

Specifically, in Mrs. Tran’s case, she has a clear vision for Nutifood, which is to provide
high-quality and nutritious products to consumers. Moreover, the company currently has an
innovative vision of "using modern technology from Germany and Sweden to produce
products that ensure quality, safety and environmental hygiene" (Tran and Nguyen , 2021).
To adapt the company's vision and innovation, she communicates this vision to her
employees and inspires them to work towards this common goal and always prioritizes
innovation policy, including understanding about consumers’ behavior through market
research, application of scientific and technical research and investment in technology.
Therefore, Mrs. Tran and her staff are constantly researching and developing new nutritional
products suitable for each object. Not only that, she always encourages her employees to
think creatively and come up with new ideas for the next products to meet the company's
goals (Nguyen, 2021). To sum up, this approach has helped to create a culture of innovation,
personal growth, and continuous improvement within the company.

Using transformational leadership theory reveals both pros and cons. On the one hand,
transactional leadership provides advantages to organizations. First of all, transformational
leaders value the talents and knowledge of their team members. As a result, the staff
members experience support and put in extra effort to get the desired result. Also
advantageous to the business is the decrease in turnover expenses. When a firm invests in
training someone and they ultimately leave, the business has to spend on training someone
else. Employee turnover is reduced by transformational leadership, which increases their
feelings of belonging and engagement in the company (Charalambous, 2019).

However, people may also feel under pressure because organizational values are too highly
valued by transformational leaders. Employee demotivation may result from management's
relentless pressure to help the team realize the intended goal. The pressure conveys to the
staff that far more is expected of them than they are now able to provide, from there it will
affect organizational performance (Charalambous, 2019).

2. Management theories in Vinamilk and Nutifood (P2)

2.1. Management theory in Vinamilk
Mrs. Mai Kim Lien uses Behavioural management theory. The behavioral approach refers
to a set of propositions that focus on the human relations movement affecting the productivity
of organizations (Kimmy, 2021). Therefore, managers employing the behavioral approach
tend to have a better understanding of human behavior, such as motivation, conflict,
expectations, and group dynamics, which is associated with increased productivity.

Evidence

Using behavioral theory brings both advantages and disadvantages. Regarding advantages, by
focusing on individual attitudes and actions at work, behavioral management helps managers
better understand their staff members' needs, motivations, and methods for handling conflict
in the workplace. Moreover, it also assists managers in better understanding employee
behavior, which will strengthen staff loyalty to the organization, raise staff morale, and
eventually result in a major increase in productivity and efficiency. However, there are
drawbacks of behavioral management. The largest limitation to behavioral theory is
adaptability such as lack of understanding of how to apply behavioral theory in various
situations and cultural contexts. A behavior that works in one circumstance might not be
widespread enough to function in another. Secondly, managers will not adequately address
decisions based on important employee characteristics like understanding, emotions, and
degrees of consciousness if descriptions of human personality are too limited (Burger, 2011).

2.2. Management theory in Nutrifood

Mrs. Tran uses Management by objective theory. MBO is defined as a strategic
management model adopted by managers to control the employees in order to reach the
objectives introduced by an organization (Islami et al., 2018). According to Islami et al.
(2018), managers employing the MBO approach tend to monitor and evaluate the
performance and progress of each employee against the established objectives.

The goals of Nutifood is not only raising the nutritional standards for Vietnamese people,
improving the health of users, thereby contributing to building a healthy society in terms of
physical strength and intelligence, but also reaching the world level on the dairy market map
(Hoai, 2019). To meet the goals, she guided and assigned each department with different
objectives. For example, the objective of the R&D department in Nutifood is to make
changes in their product to gain more sales, so she always closely monitors the work process
of staff in this department, even directly working and participating with the employees to fix
their objectives (Nguyen, 2021). Since then, she and her staff have gone to three key
malnutrition areas including Ha Giang (35%), Kon Tum (40%), Binh Phuoc (30.2%). Here,
she exchanged with their target audience, which is the local women's association. From there,
she had the experience of living closely with mothers and studied the family's activities to
collect advice such as changing the taste of milk. Hence, she can correct and improve the
actions of the product of Nutifood and evaluate employees on their ability to complete their
work (Tu, 2019).
Using MBO brings advantages and disadvantages. In terms of advantages, managerial
effectiveness is emphasized by MBO as a core value for the entire organization. Moreover,
this attention filters down to every management and employee, affecting them all. Each
manager's choices reflect this, hence, the organization as a whole performs better. Second,
MBO strengthens management effort coordination and concentration due to its objective-
focused approach. Resources are used to their maximum potential and opposing pressures in
the same direction are avoided. By contrast, MBO also brings disadvantages. MBO
frequently overlooks other aspects of a firm, including the conduct culture, a positive work
ethos, and opportunities for engagement and contribution, as it is so intent on achieving
objectives and targets. The pressure to achieve the targets within the time limit is put on the
staff. Moreover, MBO makes the assumption that the goals will remain in place until they are
attained in a stable environment. However, in reality, a lot of unanticipated things might
happen, making the goal either irrelevant or useless. MBO is challenging to execute in an
environment where unforeseen changes happen regularly (Hayes, 2023)

3. Impact of leadership and management theories on organizational effectiveness (M1)

Objective of Vinamilk is to increase sales volume by 15% in 2023. Mrs. Mai has
demonstrated her ability to effectively utilize the transactional leadership theory and
Behavioural management theory in order to help the company achieve its organizational
objectives. This combination of leadership styles has enabled Vinamilk to reach its goals
more efficiently and quickly despite the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. In detail, in 2020,
despite facing the Covid-19 pandemic, the company is still valued at an additional 200
million USD compared to 2019, reaching 2.4 billion USD (thitruongbiz, 2021). By leveraging
these theories, she has been able to increase employee engagement and morale, which has led
to improved performance and productivity. Her implementation of these reasons motivated
employees through awards while also providing them with clear direction and guidance
through her behavioral management approach. In reality, it still has barriers to the leadership
and management of employees to achieve the business objective.

Objective of Nutifood is to increase 20% profitability in 2023. Mrs. Tran has been credited
with transforming the company into a successful and profitable business by utilizing
transformational leadership theory and management by objectives (MBO). By
implementing these strategies, Mrs. Tran has enabled Nutifood to reach its organizational
objectives through improved communication and collaboration between employees. This has
resulted in increased motivation among staff members and improved performance levels
across the organization. As a result, Nutifood has seen an increase in efficiency, productivity,
and profitability as well as improved customer satisfaction levels due to better quality
products and services. Specifically, since 2000, under the leadership and management of Ms.
Le, Nutifood has found the changes needed during difficult and crisis periods, from which it
has developed as it is today, Nutifood has built a distribution system throughout 64 provinces
and cities in Vietnam with revenue growth of more than 250% annually (Suong, 2018). Not
only that, in 2019, Nutifood Vietnam's net revenue reached VND 678.8 billion, up 7% over
the previous year and net profit at 93.6 billion dong. By the end of 2019, Nutifood Vietnam's
total assets reached VND 1,289 billion, equity at VND 806 billion, this is a strong growth and
marks the great development of Nutifood (Thao, 2022).

4. Leadership and management styles in a range of situations (P3)

4.1. Leadership and management styles in Vinamilk
- Before COVID-19
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Mrs. Mai was renowned for her democratic leadership style.
Specifically, in 2018, the dairy industry, including Vinamilk, was experiencing a decline in
growth because consumers have many milk substitutes. Understanding that, during the
meeting to discuss the issue of new products, she had the opportunity to discuss with the
R&D team to come up with new and creative ideas about products that are still suitable for
the company's situation. She encouraged collaboration and opened dialogue between the
members of the team, allowing all employees to contribute their ideas and opinions as
expanding the development direction to products such as launching new product lines to keep
up with consumer trends through product upgrading and promoting the lines of yogurt and
milk substitutes such as soy milk ‌(BVSC, 2018). From there, she synthesized the opinions of
employees and made the best decision for the company.

- During COVID-19
Mrs. Mai had an autocratic leadership style. During the Covid-19 epidemics, Mrs. Mai was
the one who made all the decisions the business made or when changing working methods.
Employees are only notified of changes as they are implemented. Since she has arranged staff
to work to adapt to the epidemic situation. In which, she has allocated 50% of employees to
work from home, 50% of employees to work in the office. At the same time, she asked all
employees to focus on researching and developing new products and launching them into the
market (Dinh, 2020).

- After COVID-19:
She adopts democratic leadership style. According to Vinamilk's annual report, the company
is facing the problem that the price of animal feed increased by 30-40% last year and shows
no sign of decreasing in 2022. Therefore, in the annual meeting of Vinamilk, she encouraged
employees giving innovative ideas to come up with solutions to this dilemma. Since then, she
listened to employees' opinions and offered new solutions in accordance with the current
situation of the company, from accelerating the speed of research and development of new
products, towards serving the needs of comprehensive nutrition, to promoting the application
of technology in sustainable agriculture (Minh, 2022).
4.2. Leadership and management styles in Nutrifood
- Before COVID-19:
Before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mrs. Tran had established a democratic
leadership style that was based on collaboration and respect. For example, in 2018, Nutifood
set the goal of encroaching on making instant coffee, Nutifood dairy company ambitiously
brought iced milk coffee to the US market. There she held an emergency meeting with all
managers of all departments in the company. At this meeting, she highlighted the creativity
and innovation among his team members by providing them with a safe environment to
express their ideas, through which they discussed how to get the best raw coffee from the
coffee growing area. Dak Lak's famous coffee, while taking advantage of technology and
internal R&D force to produce a product in the form of instant coffee but keeping the taste
like filtered roasted coffee with sweetened condensed milk ‌(Phuong, 2018).

- During COVID-19
She adopted a laissez-faire leadership style. During the pandemic, the problem for Nutifood
was how to sell without doing marketing because the latest product just introduced to the
market could not be sold, while the marketing budget was spent (Anh, 2020). Here, Ms. Tran
only gave the limited budget that the company currently has, then allowed the employees in
the Marketing and Sales departments to freely create marketing plans while minimizing the
costs in the marketing campaign of the company and setting their own schedule and making
their own decisions on new marketing projects.

- After COVID-19
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Mrs. Tran still employs a laissez-faire leadership style that
she implemented during the pandemic. In detail, in 2022, Nutifood has implemented the
project named "Nutrition house", which is a large and useful project for the company to be
applied quality. From there, during the annual meeting in 2021, she assigned the entire
project for doctors and nutritionists of Nutifood because she believed in her teams and their
expertise that has been a key factor in the success of Nutifood's projects (PV, 2021). By
delegating responsibilities to professionals, she allows all employees to freely decide and
create projects for benefiting consumers and the business as a whole.
5. Comparison of leadership and management styles in a range of situations (M2)
Before Covid-19, leaders of both Vinamilk and Nutifood showed a general similarity in the
decision-making process when using democratic leadership style. Because Ms. Mai and Ms.
Tran both hold a meeting for employees to present their creative ideas for them to synthesize
and make a final decision. For Vinamilk, Ms. Tran uses this style effectively because in 2018,
thanks to the contributions of R&D members, Vinamilk continuously introduced to
consumers typical products and brought competitive advantages. outstanding competition
such as 100% Organic Fresh Milk, 100% A2 Fresh Milk, Walnut Soy Milk, Greek Yogurt,
Glutinous Yogurt. For Nutifood, they have succeeded in producing coffee with sweetened
condensed milk. However, using this leadership style takes a lot of time because everyone in
the team needs to discuss, debate and discuss to come to a final decision.

During Covid-19, fluctuations in the economic market caused the two leaders of Vinamilk
and Nutifood to have changes in their leadership styles. While Mrs. Mai used an autocratic
leadership style when laissez-faire was applied by Mrs. Tran. This difference is because the
two leaders have different development orientations during the epidemic period. Also, in
order to have certainty and fast efficiency in work, Ms. Mai is forced to ask each group of
departments to follow the assigned work as well as the way of working employees'
contributions' creative ideas and their contributions, this can make employees feel
disrespected and reduce the spirit of and creativity while Mrs. Tran believed in the creativity
of her team. However, if team members receive little or no guidance, they may not
understand exactly what their role in the group is and what they are supposed to do with their
time.

In the post COVID-19, for Vinamilk, Mrs. Mai has returned to the democratic leadership
style because this is the style that is most suitable for the company's development method,
contributing to the company's stability and growth. Meanwhile, for Nutifood, the company
has had to go through many difficult periods, especially during the pandemic, so Mrs. Tran
understands the capabilities of her team, so she can have enough confidence to leave projects
to her employees to decide for themselves and to be creative.

To summarize, according to the three situations before, during and after the pandemic, it
seems that Mé. Mai’s leadership style is more effective than Mrs. Tran’s empowering
leadership style. Because its achievements are not only in numbers but it is also in prestigious
awards, Vinamilk post continuously won the top company award while Nutifood achieved
reports of company profit. Not only that, Vinamilk's growth rate in 2021 is higher than that of
Nutifood, which is 10.2% of the former compared to 5.6% of the latter (Han and Hoa, 2022)

6. Antecedents of the organizational culture of Vinamilk and Nutifood (P4)

Organizational culture refers to a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which
governs how people behave in organizations and affects the company's distinguishing points
from other companies (Schneider et al., 2013).

There are 6 dimensions of organizational culture namely adaptability, attention to detail,

outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation and integrity.

6.1. The organizational culture of Vinamilk:

The organizational culture that Vinamilk uses is people orientation and adaptability. Firstly,
people orientation means the degree to which management choices consider potential effects
on internal and external stakeholders (Robbins and Coulter, 2021).Vinamilk has people-
orientated culture because for their employees, Vinamilk has implemented several initiatives
to ensure its workforce is highly motivated and engaged, such as providing flexible working
hours, offering competitive salaries, and providing additional benefits like free meals and
health insurance. Vinamilk also emphasizes on developing its employees’ skills through
training programs and seminars to ensure that they are well-equipped for their roles. For their
customers, Vinamilk puts a lot of emphasis on customer service by listening to customers'
feedback and responding quickly to any complaints or issues. This shows that the company
values its customers’ opinions and wants them to have the best experience possible when
interacting with them (Nguyen, 2021). Not only that, Vinamilk always studies the consumer
demand in detail and strives towards becoming capable enough to deliver the needed
products and services to the customers. Similarly, they also provide quality customized
products and services that cater to the needs of the customers. Meanwhile, adaptability means
how quickly organizations adjust their business processes and improvise themselves to
achieve their goals (Robbins and Coulter, 2021). Vinamilk creates many opportunities to
encourage employees to develop them available

6.2. Organizational culture of Nutifood

The organizational culture that Nutifood uses is Outcome orientation and attention in
detail which is defined as the degree to which management lays more emphasis on results
than on the techniques and methods used to achieve them (Robbins and Coulter, 2021).
Nutifood adopts outcome-oriented to improve customer satisfaction, it focuses on innovation
and creative problem solving, and its dedication to continuous improvement. From there,
Nutifood sets a goal to become the number one brand in Vietnam's dairy industry. Vinamilk
always seeks to understand the needs of customers. To achieve this, the company invested in
research and development, marketing, and production. By adopting a culture that emphasizes
outcomes, Nutifood implemented key performance indicators for each department that allows
employees to work with enthusiasm and purpose. Furthermore, all employees are evaluated
based on results and fulfillment of clearly outlined objectives

Attention to detail: The degree of attention to detail, analysis, and precision are demanded of
staff

6.3. Factors affecting organizational culture of Vinamilk and Nutifood. (P4)

There are four factors that will affect the office culture: Philosophy, selection criteria, top
management, socialization (Szczepańska et al., 2017)
The factor affecting Vinamilk culture is the philosophy of Mrs. Mai Kieu Lien and top
management. In detail, her philosophy is based on the idea of “building a family-like
culture” and this is reflected in many aspects of Vinamilk’s operations to all employees in the
company. Therefore, her philosophy in management and leadership style has been
instrumental in creating a strong organizational culture at Vinamilk that has helped it to
become one of the most successful companies in the dairy industry of Vietnam.

The factor affecting Nutifood’s culture is socialization and top management. The evidence
for socializing impacts Nutifood culture is that Nutifood employees interact with each other,
their customers, and the wider community. Employees are encouraged to participate in team
building activities, as well as engage with customers on social media platforms. Furthermore,
Nutifood has implemented a number of initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion within
the company. These initiatives have helped to create an environment where everyone feels
respected and appreciated regardless of their background or beliefs. Therefore, socialization
has played a key role in shaping the culture at Nutifood and will continue to do so in the
future.

7. Impacts of Organizational culture on organizational effectiveness (M3)

8. Critical evaluation and recommendation (D1)

- Evaluate leadership and management theories applied by L1 and L2 (summary above
parts)
- Recommendations