Home Depot and Business Ethics

Home Depot

Martin Chemers describes leadership as “a process of social influence in which one person is able to enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of common task (Chemers 1997).” Much can be said about Robert Nardelli’s leadership style; in this paper I will discuss his leadership style in terms of Leadership Theory. Robert Nardelli was the former CEO of Home Depot, in his former position at General Electric he was in charge of the more large-scale industry focused business of delivering energy and power to government agencies. Nardelli received Six Sigma training while at GE, was described as a “Command and Control CEO (Nussbaum 2007)” who “imposed his mechanical process on a company that was known for its great fuzzy-front-end, pro-consumer culture (Nussbaum 2007).” Nardelli’s tenure at Home Depot was transformational, in five years he was able to more than double the earnings per share and under his leadership revenue climbed to around $80 billion in 2005. (Charan 2006)” Nardelli was also driven by the data and took little consideration in the human element of the business. When he began at Home Depot the company saw a huge loss in executive level talent through turnover, this was said to be due to his “in your face” management style. Some of his cost-cutting efforts caused the customer experience to suffer as he cut several fulltime job in favor for lower cost part-time positions.

If we look at Nardelli’s leadership style using the Trait Theory we find that he did indeed posse those traits that the text describes as necessary for the Trait Theory. Nardelli was a former CEO at General Electric and based on that the Home Depot board of directors chose him as the person to lead Home Depot into the future. While I cannot comment on Nardelli’s physical attributes I will say according to the reading(s) he had the Personal Traits like; wisdom, intellect, judgment and capacity for work which are characteristics of the Trait Theory....