Organizational development

Résumé du document

Organizational cultures can vary a lot from a company to another. As we have seen in class, they are influenced by many different factors like the cultural-background of the employees, the country in which the company is implanted in, the size of the company, the industry etc… This amount of factors makes it rare for companies to have exactly the same corporate cultures. They become more complex and more distinctive from each other.

In the last decades, corporate cultures have evolved a lot. As Eric Van de Steen states in his paper On the Origin and Evolution of Corporate Culture, it went from small family owned businesses to huge international organization implanted all around the world. Today, companies often deal with workers, clients, suppliers and partners from many different cultural backgrounds. They are more open to the international market and therefore have to adopt new corporate cultures in order to find a way to successfully manage a multicultural company.

Extraits

[...] Harold Leavitt, professor emeritus of organizational behavior at Stanford University, supports this idea. In his book Top Down: Why Hierarchies Are to Stay and How to Manager Them More Effectively, he states: “Hierarchies are going to be with us whether we like it or not because hierarchies are effective for getting things done” and “I'm all for humanizing organizations, but they can flatten so much that you lose control”. I therefore think that organizations should flatten a bit by giving more responsibilities and decision-making power to their employees but should not become too flat by keeping a sense of hierarchy in the company. [...]

[...] As I have said before, companies are becoming more international than ever and they therefore try to adapt or create corporate cultures that would fit its multicultural workforce. The main problem in multicultural companies is communication. People from different backgrounds have different ways of communication and interpretations. Companies have to take that into account and impose corporate cultures that would facilitate the communication between the employees from different cultural background. They will impose the use of only one language (probably English), make sure employees follow strict rules in order to avoid communication problems and have a more neutral environment to make sure employees doesn't feel lost. [...]

[...] The adaptation was really fast and the development of the project worked very well. A week later, I went back to the work I was doing before without any difficulty. The corporate culture of ELTEG was very open which gave it more flexibility and promoted changes. Organizational Design Can an organizational structure be too flat? Do you think all organizations should be flat? Why do you think some organizations are more complex? Support your argument with research from the experts. A flat organizational structure can have some good aspect for a company. [...]

[...] Workers are not used to take initiatives and are really dependent from the other employees and managers. If they were given 20% free time, they would probably not know what to do of it. The 20% free time rewarding system could be very attractive in France, as French people are very individualistic. French workers are known for showing-off and trying to become the best by differentiating themselves from the other. They try to cultivate their difference by using different work approaches than the other employees. [...]

[...] These results depend on the nature of the work. He concluded that if a work is intellectual and necessitates creativity it is better to give more liberty to the employee in order to be more productive. On the other hand if the work is mechanical, a carrot-and-stick motivation strategy is enough. We can of course find this strategy at Google, where the employees have 20% of free time to develop their own projects. This motivates the employees to be more creative and find good ideas to present to the company. [...]