An Analysis of Apples Organizational Behavior - Assignment Example

An analysis of Apple’s Organizational Behavior Introduction Apple incorporation is a technological multinational companythat offers innovative and creative technological solutions to solve individual’s needs. Apple is among the 500 fortune companies in the world. As a result of this, its success makes it a bench mark for many other companies. It attributes its success to great leadership and management of organization behavior, by harnessing and channeling its human resource talents to providing quality products and services that address a wide range of technological problems and needs. The production of quality products subsequently gives it a competitive advantage (Nelson & Quick chapter 1, 24). Apple leverages on its strong leadership and ability to beat stiff competition, in order to remain significant and overcome challenges such as the death of its co-founder Steve Jobs (Fowler & Vascellaro 1) and major ethical and managerial challenges. This analysis focuses on Apple’s unique culture and work environment, how the leadership style and organizational structure contribute to its growth, ethical challenges and how the company manages its internal and external conflicts. The paper asserts that Apple’s success is attributed to strong and efficient management of organization behavior and positive response to environmental challenges that offset the balance in organizational behavior. Analysis of Organizational Behavior Apple has a unique culture driven by passion for new products with no end to challenges and opportunities. Apple is the pioneer of ‘work hard play hard’ ethic that advocates for maintenance of strong work ethics. However, although Apple’s work environment is often casual and relaxed, there is strong commitment to meeting deadlines. Thus, the work culture is fun yet demanding. Apple’s workers have great autonomy and independence of work as they work in a challenging and creative work environment. The company adopted a style that is neither too formal nor hierarchical and result-driven approach to work. The culture at Apple encourages creativity within the formal structure of product development and launches ((Fowler & Vascellaro 1). Apple is ‘an army’ everyone has a role in the product development cycle and is responsible for results in that role. The culture emphasizes on work ethics, workers’ autonomy and independence in their work. The culture also idolizes product development and a sense of continuous improvement. Apple has a unique work environment that focuses on organizational behavior. Human behavior at Apple is characterized by opportunities that give workers chances for career advancement. Change characterizes the organization in terms of transformation/modifications of employees and other stakeholders. The workers are also challenged to compete, contest and battle for available opportunities so that career advancement is based on merit. The work environment is also influenced by internal and external perspectives (Garsten, 20). The internal perspective focuses on employees’ psychology to predict their behavior. It also focuses on thoughts, feelings, experiences and individual’s needs. The external perspective focuses on external events, consequences and environmental forces to influence human behavior in the desired way. The company has an open system environment where it interacts with outside forces such as political, economic and legal forces. It therefore uses an open and responsive reaction to changes in the dynamic external environmental factors (xxx). Apple has a strong leadership structure and adopts the transformative leadership style. Apple’s success is attributed to its strong leadership that includes all employees in decision making especially in decisions that directly affects their work performance. Through consultative leadership where managers value the input of all employees in decision-making, the company has achieved success in developing new products and having an inclusive work culture. The company focuses on glooming top management rather than recruit new talent (Schein, 45). This makes it easy to retain the culture because the new arrangement team understands Apple’s ways of things better than new comers. For example, Apple formed Apple University to offer leadership skills to its employees. At the University, the team is gloomed to continual Apple’s culture and an in-depth understanding of the organization. This produces new leaders with a combination of talent, competence and leadership skills required to steer the company to success. The company uses the trait theory to distinguish leadership skills of its employees. It distinguishes employees with distinct physical attributes such as good health and family stability, personality attributes such as resiliency, intellectual intelligence, tenacity and insight and abilities such as interpersonal skills and diversity management. They are then gloomed to take over the company’s management because they demonstrate the ability to lead in a competitive environment and deliver great results. The leaders use Vroom-Yetton-Jago Normative Decision Model. Accordingly, the leaders focus on delegating authority so that employees take responsibility and learn decision making skills (Schein, 47). The leaders facilitate all the activities involved in decision- making such as brain-storming session. The brain storming groups are then consulted for ideas. Individuals are also consulted for input before management makes the final decision. The management also focuses on emergent issues such emotional intelligence, trust, gender equality and servant leadership to remain relevant and competent. The formal organization structure adopted by Apple concentrates decision-making to the top management ((Nelson & Quick chapter 12, 4). The structure adopted includes CEO at the top followed by the board of directors. The board is followed by middle management and knowledge experts who are responsible for running its subsidiaries. Next is the lower management who implement decisions in all subsidiaries. The lowest hierarchy consists of supervisors who monitor the actual ground work and implementation of specific instructions in their departments such as software, hardware and provision of IT services (Burke, 48). The simple structure is important in maintaining clear channels of communication and establishing sound lines of authority. The structure makes it easy to make decisions because it reduces the bureaucracy involved in large corporations like Apple. Establishing good organizational structure and design enables the company to avoid contradictions such as confusion within roles, poor coordination among functions, failure to share ideas and poor conflict resolution methods. The structure keeps the top management aware of problems within the organization and triggers them to find solutions to organizational challenges. The company uses a variety of conflict resolution and negotiation methods to solve managerial and ethical conflicts. Conflict resolution is an important indicator of management’s success and a reflection of emotional intelligence i.e. the power to remain in control of one’s emotions in an emotional charged environment. Apple faces functional conflict that leads to positive results such as new ideas and stronger relationships. It also faces dysfunctional conflict that drains energy and leads to aggression if not well managed (Burke, 50). The company faces intrapersonal (occurs within and individual) and interpersonal (occurs between more than one individual) conflicts ((Nelson & Quick chapter 12, 17). Intrapersonal conflicts are resolved by conducting a role analysis to clarify expectations in order to reduce conflict within and between roles. Developing political skills will hedge against negative effects of stress that result from role conflicts. The company manages interpersonal conflict by clarifying power networks, identifying defence mechanism displayed by individuals and initiating strategies to deal with difficult personalities. Apple also uses win-win negotiation to manage its conflicts. This method focuses on both the conflicting sides negotiating and compromising in order to find a solution that benefits both sides ((Nelson & Quick chapter 12, 27). This way, animosity between the conflicting parties is avoided but instead leads to the establishment of strong relationships that lead to cooperation and proper coordination of core operations, in order to increase creativity. An example of a recent ethical conflict in Apple involved poor working conditions of workers in its China subsidiary Foxconn. Reports on Foxconn revealed incidences where employees committed suicide presumably from working in extremely high stressing environment (Ferrell, Odies & Fraedrich, 28) Reports also indicate deplorable living conditions, underage employment, below-standard wages, involuntary labor and health hazards emanating from inadequate air conditioning systems and use of harmful/ dangerous chemicals. Other ethical reports indicated high incidences of bribery, falsified records and adverse health effects among workers due to the frequent exposure to dangerous substances like hexane gas. Apple responded to these incidences by conducting an audit in the affected subsidiaries that confirmed the allegations. It then compensate the affected members and improved work conditions such as giving protective gear to workers in hazardous environment, increased wages and a program to manage work stress. It also joined the Fair Labor Association that regulates workers conditions, in order to show more commitment to its employees’ welfare (Ferrell, Odies & Fraedrich, 29). It is recommended that Apple adopt planned change approach to achieve positive organizational efficiency and success. Planned change results from deliberate decision to alter the organization in order to steer the company to the next level of success. In adopting this change strategy, the company should focus on external forces such as globalization, workforce diversity, technological change and ethical behavior. The ethical behavior should focus on continuous ethics audit to identify any loops of bribery, records concealment and poor working conditions and work on them quickly before they dent its image (Hacki & Lighton, 28). The design should focus on technological change in order to identify areas that need improvement and facilitate development of new products and services (Gupta & Joe 215). Focusing on globalization will ensure that the company maintains a high performance environment that adopts to international laws and practices and beats stiff competition through provision of quality innovative IT solutions (Kenney 4). Managing workforce diversity will enable the management to harness workers creativity to develop new products and increase leadership efficiency especially strategic decision-making. Conclusion The Apple way indicates the company’s turbulent history and use of unique culture to achieve success. Over the past 30 years, various leaders have contributed to Apple’s success especially its co-founder, Steve Jobs. Innovation and creativity made Apple launch its IPO successfully and its shares gained great value in 1984. However in 1985 there were disputes that saw co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs leave (Cruickshank, 3). This was followed by poor employee management and reduced innovation. Early leaders such as Mr. Scullery made major blunders such as launching a flawed hand-held computer without doing a technical market analysis. When Steve Jobs joined the firm later on, he implemented a unique culture that focused on four themes. First, make the product king theme focused on providing innovative quality products that offered exceptional value to customers. Second, Making customer king intended to increase customer loyalty and retention by giving them superior customer service and commitment to solving their technological needs (Cruickshank, 5). Third, breaking the marketing mold by adopting non-traditional marketing strategies such as the successful tagline, ‘Think Different’ used for iMac. Fourth, fix your leaders and your plan theme created congruence between the CEO’s values and the company culture in order to achieve overall success. Work Cited Burke, Ronal J. "Methods of resolving interpersonal conflict." Personnel Administration 32.4 (1969): 48-55. Cruickshank, J. "The Apple Way: 12 Management Lessons from the World’s Most Innovative Company." (2006). Ferrell, Odies C., and John Fraedrich. Business ethics: Ethical decision making & cases. Cengage learning, 2014. Fowler, Geoffrey A, and Vascellaro, Jessica E. Apples Game Plan: Avoiding Culture Shock --- How to Preserve a CEOs Ethos? Company Had Nearly Decade to Prepare; Gathering a Top 100 and Starting a University. Dow Jones & Company Inc, 2011. Print Garsten, Christina. Apple World: Core and Periphery in a Transnational Organizational Culture: A Study of Apple Computer Inc. Coronet Books, 2014. Gupta, Atul, and Joe Prinzinger. "Apple, Inc.: Where Is It Going From Here?." Journal of Business Case Studies (JBCS) 9.3 (2013): 215-220. Print Hacki, Remo, and Julian Lighton. "The future of the networked company." The McKinsey Quarterly (2001): 26-35 Kenney, Mattew. The Apple Way: 12 Management Lessons from the Worlds Most Innovative Company. Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship 12.1 (Jan 2007) ): 113-115. Print Nelson, D., & Quick, J. (2014). ORGB 4. Cengage Learning. Print Schein, Edgar H. Organizational culture and leadership. Vol. 356. John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Read More