Management Issues at the McDonalds Chain of Restaurants – Term Paper

Management refers to coordination and organization of activities of a business entity with an aim of achieving defined objectives. Management includes interlocking functions for the creation of corporate policy. It also involves planning, controlling, directing and organizing the resources of an organization in pursuit of an organization’s policy.  This study will explore all the management-related issues at the McDonald’s restaurant chain. The paper will be divided into nine chapters. The study will be formally introduced in Chapter 1 that will encompass background information, problem statement, and justification for the study. Other areas to be covered under this chapter will be significance of the study, objectives of the study, hypotheses and research questions. Chapter 2 will include related literature and theoretical focus. The literature review will focus on the earlier works of various scholars concerning the subject matter of the study will be reviewed.

For the first time in nine years, McDonald’s registered a drop in sales by 1.8 percent in 2012. During the same year, the total sales in its U.S market actually dropped by 1.4 percent. Although this drop was partially attributed to the strength of the dollar against other currencies where the chains of restaurants are located, management-related issues cannot be overruled. This saw the replacement of Jan Fields, McDonald’s Head of U.S. Operations with Jeff Stratton, the Chief Executive at McDonald’s. The restaurant chains are faced with a number of management issues that have stalled its progress over the years. Although McDonald’s restaurants are spread across the entire globe, there have been complaints that the establishments do not provide foods that commensurate with respective local tastes and the management is yet to factor in this. Additionally, McDonald’s has not yet taken advantage of social networking as a means of marketing its products. It still heavily relies on traditional means of marketing and this has cut out a huge demographic of adolescent and teen diners. McDonald’s restaurants are mainly located in shopping malls such as Wal-Mart to strategically target thousands of shoppers visiting the stores. This study aims to find out the implication of management related issues on towards the performance of McDonald’s chains of restaurants

Data for the study will be generated through admission of predesigned questionnaires and interviews. Randomly selected members of staff and customers will be issued with online questionnaires where they will be expected to fill in and resubmit via the same online platform. Senior members of staff, mostly those in management will be directly interviewed.interview schedules will guide the development of interview questions.  Sampling will involve selection of a group of employees who have been working at McDonald’s for more than five years and customers who have been frequenting the stores for more than two years. Four stores will be selected across the US and from each store two managers, three senior members of staff, four junior employees and four regular customers will be selected to take part in the study. The data collected will thereafter be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative data analysis will involve quantifying the problem through numerical data generation that can be changed into statistics that are usable. Qualitative research will help in the provision of insights into the problem.