The Culture of the Founders - Report Example

Name: Course: Instructor: University: Date: Corporate Culture Q 1: Paradox: how do you maintain a vibrant and successful culture? The organisational cultures of most companies assume the culture of the founders. As new employees enter and past employees leave, it can be difficult to maintain a vibrant and thriving culture that was originally set by the organisation founders. This is because, at a certain point, the founders may have no time to engender new employees with the essential value systems. Therefore, companies should incorporate strategies that help keep their culture. First, the top management of a company that wishes to maintain a vibrant culture should allow for adjustment, but seek to preserve ideologies. This is because ideologies construct rationale, explain and justify actions (English). Secondly, management can formulate challenging objectives, which it will use to encourage growth of employees. A vibrant culture is maintained when an organisation allows for experimentation. The management should not be strict to new employees, but it should rather paradox and avoid the “either or” thinking. Management can convert an organisation’s core values into goals, practices and strategies. This creates alignment of employee behaviours and values with the company’s values and objectives. To maintain an existing culture, a company should seek to produce new managers through hiring, compensation and incentives. Hiring for instance, determines whether a company’s culture will be subject to threats of change, or erosion, or it will remain stable. An excellent example of a company that ensures it preserves its culture through hiring is Michelin. Recruits have the opportunity to decide whether they fit into the company’s culture or they should leave. Also, old employees who are conversant with an organisation’s culture can help in maintaining that culture by training new employees. According to (Lieberman), old employees who understand an organisation’s values, concepts, and culture should help newer employees in learning and implementing such values to reduce chances of them bringing some of their own culture. Management should also establish a system where new employees learn the company’s culture, either in written or unwritten form. Frequent and continuous assessment on the company’s growth by management also helps in preserving organizational culture. During the early stages of the formation of a company, empowerment and freedom are the most prevalent attributes. Employee empowerment helps in achieving the desired level of employee motivation and satisfaction (Durai). It provides employees with autonomy. Allowing employees freedom on actions at an early stage of company formation, equips them with responsibility because they are always accountable for their actions. At later stages, as the organization grows, honesty becomes necessary because old employees and new employees need to be honesty so as to maintain a company’s culture. Q2: Paradox – a great corporate culture seems to just happen To develop a unique culture for a high growth company, management should consider reorganising the organisational structure so as to have a flat structure rather than the hierarchical top down decision making structures. A flat structure is efficient because the decision making process is always fast (Murray, Poole and Jones). Secondly, management should embrace teamwork and coordination between functions, levels and business units. Teamwork provides a broad organisational performance opportunity through increased productivity (Lussier and Achua). On the other hand, companies that embrace bureaucracy do not grow at a fast rate because this management style poses challenges, leading to a loss of their competitive advantage. Therefore, to develop a unique culture for a high growth organisation, companies must transform from hierarchy to adhocracy based culture. Adhocracy is entrepreneurial, dynamic and offers creative opportunities. Also, Management of a company should practice visionary, risk oriented and innovative leadership. Management should support experimentation and innovation. High adaptability to the changing market, hence leading to a change in strategies without destabilizing the workforce helps to develop a unique culture for a high growth company. To develop a unique culture for a high growth company, management of a company will have to set high standards and ensures that there is employee development to aid in achieving the set standards. Practising good management styles embracing superior communication and professional development and training also help in creating a unique culture for a high growth organisation. Management should also involve employees in decision making, ensure a consistent image or vision, recruit employees who fit the organisation’s vision and hold people accountable for their actions to develop a unique culture. Fast growth, mistakes in hiring and replacement of old managers with new ones cannot cause a potential damage to a company’s culture. This is because the new employees and managers become socialised into the organization, therefore, becoming acculturated. This exerts a powerful indirect force for controlling behaviour. Secondly, the new executives may have never articulated new vision and values by trying to control and measure certain things, which could cause damage to an organisation’s culture. Societal culture is a threat to organisational culture. This is the greatest threat because societies where organisations operate require the organisations to adopt a culture similar to that of the society. An organisation can find itself in this situation due to globalisation, which leads to an organisation operating in a new environment. This is followed by obligatory organisational change. Organisational change is a threat to organisational culture. It makes adherents of the culture resistant to change. An organisation cannot undergo a change without altering its culture. According to Lewin’s change model, when an organisation has to change, it has to destabilize the present balance of forces that give the organisation its unique culture. This is followed by change, which continues until a new balance is achieved (Select Knowledge). Change projects can alter the organisation’s culture because they interfere with managerial practices of a company. This may lead to misalignments with the company’s existing culture. Misalignments are associated with threats to organizational culture. This, in turn, leads to uncertainty, which leads to lack of trust among organisational members. Most employees seek to find out ways of confirming that organisational culture is at check when change projects are introduced to an organisation. This may lead to the emergency of second order changes that alter the initial intentions of change pioneers. The third threat to organisational culture is the threat of resource allocation. Employees develop fear and resistance to change because they are afraid of the fate of established resource allocations and the threats to already established power relations. This leads to a limited focus of change because management and employees will focus on how other parts of the organisation will be affected. Finally, uncertainty is a threat to organisational culture. This comes in after an organisation undergoes change because this is associated with an increase in departments due to complexity. There is also uncertainty in finding, hiring and training new employees, based on the paradox of resource availability (Daft). This order of threats to organisational culture is justified by the fact that organisations face a major threat from societal culture at first. This forces them to change, and normally change is associated by resistance or erosion of organisational culture. Resource allocation follows because change is normally associated with the creation of several new departments. Finally, uncertainty threatens an organisation’s culture because employees and management have no clear understanding on what is likely to happen to the already existing power relationships. As a manager charged with the responsibility of developing, embedding a great culture and mitigating against its erosion, I would ensure appropriate selection of employees during hiring. To ensure that employees embrace the culture that management wants for the organisation, the recruitment criteria should allow for evaluation of individual behaviour against organisational values. Therefore, candidates whose values do not fit with the organisation’s values should be screened. Only fitting candidates should be hired to enable develop the required organisational culture. Secondly, I would ensure that the top management ensures that they use appropriate management style. Bureaucracy should be avoided so that management executives can act as examples to employees. Finally, I would create room for a smooth socialization process whereby existing employees will be supportive to new employees. This means that old employees should teach the new employees about the company’s culture and help them to adopt by getting accustomed to the organisation’s culture. . Q3: Paradox: companies use acquisitions to accelerate growth and gain skills. There are always impacts of operational and cultural problems that arise from the differences in culture of the organisations that are involved in mergers or acquisitions. This leads to the failure of mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances. Cultural clash causes internal misunderstanding and conflicts which is characterised by different ways of doing things and talking about things. Consequently there is loss of time, increased inefficiencies. Also, internal focus increases when the newly formed company should set clear purpose, plan and action with strong external focus. This results to slow decision making due to differences in supervision, and communication. The two companies involved in such acquisitions normally have different cultures, with different supervision and communication methods. There always arise different opinions, disagreements, arguments and different assumptions pertaining to the internal process of implementing the new business plan strategy. This leads to low productivity because either side pulls in a different direction. Companies involve in acquisitions have different organisational beliefs, values and practices. This means that there will be differences in the degree of formality, language and communication between the two companies. In acquisitions, the involved companies use a winner-loser language through their people. Speed of implementing the integration and achieving post merger effectiveness is lowered, causing an obstacle to achieving the clarity and focus that is required for success (Carleton). Q4: Using the culture table above compare 2 high growth companies of your choice? The table provides a comparison of eBay and Google companies, which are both high growth companies. Attribute eBay Google Honesty Believes that an open environment and honest can bring the best in people Organisational culture the “Avoid being evil” slogan. Therefore, culture calls for being honest and useful so as to be responsive Alignment Management ensures that employee commitments and contribution are in line with organisational values There is a high degree of alignment between employees and the company’s values, plans and actions Risk The company embraces speed, flexibility and entrepreneurial innovation in introducing new services Google promotes speed, flexibility and entrepreneurial innovation in improving services Teams Has always used teams such as the local management teams that were used to establish presence in Italy, Canada and France (Venzin). Uses small teams of three to six employees who use what the company can easily procure. They also prevent freeloading and reduce conflicts (Girard). Empowerment Management provides employees with training and all the tools for their work Employees are allowed to use one fifth of their time to do their own projects Freedom Allows employees to make teams with members that they are comfortable Allows innovation, experimentation and accountability of own actions. Allocates time to employees to work on own project. Support Treats employees as unique persons, and provides them with all the necessary requirement for work Prevision of guidance, hardware and software needs to employees through the in house tech shop. Engagement Engages employees through alignment to business strategy Engages employees trough free high quality meals Stimuli Faces strong competition from other companies for internet users Faces stiff competition over internet users from other companies such as apple Communication Open and honest communication among employees is enhanced by an open and trusting environment Facilitates meaningful communication among employees at all levels and across all departments Works Cited Carleton, J Robert. Achieving Post-Merger Success: A Stakeholder's Guide to Cultural Due Diligence, Assessment, and Integration. Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons Press, 2004. Daft, Richard L. Organization Theory and Design. Mason: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2010. Durai, Durai Pravin. Human Resource Management. New Delhi: Pearson Education Press, 2010. English, Fenwick W. The SAGE Handbook of Educational Leadership: Advances in Theory, Research and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications , 2005. Girard, Bernard. The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It. San Francisco: O'Reilly Press, 2008. Lieberman, Simma. "How to Create and Maintain the Culture of Your Organization as You Grow." 2013. 24 March 2013 . Lussier, Robert N and Christopher F Achua. Leadership: Theory, Application, & Skill Development. Sidney: SouthWestern Cengage Learning Press, 2010. Murray, Peter, David Poole and Grant Jones. Contemporary Issues in Management and Organisational Behaviour. South Melbourne: Thomson Learning Press, 2006. Select Knowledge. Organisational Behaviour and Change Management. London: Select Knowledge Press Limited, 2005. Venzin, Markus. Building an International Financial Services Firm:How to Design and Execute Cross-Border Strategies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Read More