Organizational Transformation
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Organizational Transformation
University of Phoenix
Leadership Research
Todays business world is a fast-paced, complex environment that has many ways to achieve success. Many corporations and their leaders have fostered innovative environments for employees to excel in. There are various avenues a corporation or leader can take to improve product quality, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and the bottom line. Corporations use different leadership styles along with promoting a solid corporate culture for employees.
Leadership styles
There are many different styles of leadership. Each company and situation dictates the types of leadership that are formed. Some companies prefer a pyramid hierarchical approach while others lean towards a more flattened hierarchical approach. Our team researched and evaluated several companies to identify some practices utilized within various organizational cultures.
Google is a company that fosters a tight teamwork based philosophy that relies upon open communication. This style closely relates to the participative style of leadership. Participative leadership involves employees in the decision-making process (McShane & Von Glinow, 2005). Googles management accomplishes this by holding face-to-face meetings, current status emails, and encouraging creative thought. By allowing employees to play an active role in the companys leadership, resulting in maximized creativity.
Ford Motor Corporation has struggled for years with leaders who showed more concern with their own success rather than that of the company. The past 10 years have given way to many changes concerning managerial goals. Ford has taken steps to create an atmosphere that promotes the teamwork and collaboration of managers. Ford exhibits more of a team-based atmosphere in which groups (accounting, IT, and management) work closely together and divulge important information to each other. In creating this new atmosphere, Ford has developed the feeling of ownership, which promotes the success of the company as a whole versus the individual person.
Southwest Airlines follows a similar path where employees express ideas and assist with decision-making. Herb Keller, former CEO, feels that from a leadership standpoint, management should support the functions of the employees instead of dictating what they do. This belief follows the servant leadership style. The servant leadership style is the belief that leaders serve followers by understanding their needs and facilitating their work performance (McShane & Von Glinow, 2005). Keller is a prime example of a transformational leader. By inspiring the employee to take an active role in the companys success, he is giving employees the sense of ownership in the company. Southwest also employs the tactic of constructive conflict. Constructive conflict involves the scrutinizing of other ideas to select the best overall one to implement.
Science Applications International Corporations (SAIC) corporate culture is centered on the employee. The companys founder, J. Robert Beyster, felt that “those that contribute to the companys success should own a stake in the company and benefit from its success” (SAIC website, 2007). Beyster also believed that, “employee ownership and thinking and acting like owners motivates higher creativity and initiative, along with better performance for customers and higher level of customer satisfaction” (SAIC website, 2007). SAICs leadership style closely resembles an achievement-oriented style of leadership. Achievement-oriented leadership style refers to the leader setting challenging goals, expecting employees to perform at their highest level, and continuously seeking improvement in employee performance (McShane & Von Glinow, 2005). By taking on this style of leadership, SAIC motivates its employees to excel.
Organizational culture
Organizational culture is defined as a basic pattern of shared assumptions, values and beliefs considered the correct way of thinking about and acting on problems and opportunities facing the organization. Companies try to create an organizational culture by instituting the assumptions, values and beliefs of its stakeholders. In doing so, the company develops a corporate culture in how it conducts business.
Target Corporation promotes its culture through employees. Targets founder, George Dayton, believed that a company should give back to the community and have a positive impact on it. This belief is seen through the strong commitment to safety and community involvement. The company has created safety programs aimed at ensuring employee safety on and off the job as well as donations to community organizations. In fact, Target is one of the industry leaders when it comes to capital donations. This type of corporate culture directly supports the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) philosophy of promoting ethics in the business world.
Trust and collaboration between team members be it in management or in the lower ranking employees is important to a businesss success. An example of trust and collaboration at work is the partnership formed between Tropicana and CSX railway. For many years neither of the companies worked together, which created a lot of waste and loss of capital for both companies. By instituting levels of trust in each other and collaborating, both companies have gained from the partnership. The corporate culture of both of the companies is tied in with understanding one anothers business in order to see maximum productivity.
Wal-mart is another company that promotes a friendly corporate culture. Walmart being based in the retail industry must deal directly with the customer. The company is located in almost every demographic region throughout the United States. Since the company has such a large demographic population to deal with, it tries to provide an anti-discriminatory environment for its employees. This is important in the collaboration of the different stores with each other. It allows for better communication and understanding between the different cultural backgrounds.
Company Synopsis
Google by Jessica Belt
In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its doors in Menlo Park, California with three employees and was handling about 10,000 search queries per day. By 2000, business was booming and the company moved their headquarters to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.