Team Management
The first problem present in the case is the conflicting organisational cultures of Peirce and Winehouse (P&W) and Big Blue; an issue which since their merger seven years ago has still not been addressed.
An organisational culture is the values and assumptions shared within an organisation (Book). Big Blue has a unique corporate history based upon technology and an assumption among its employees is to stress technologically based solutions that generate greater revenue for the company. Conversely P&W were a customer-centric business that focussed on client relations and tailoring personalised solutions. As a half to two thirds of all mergers fail with unresolved corporate-culture issues being a leading reason, it is imperative that these cultural discrepancies are rectified (Harper, 1998).
The symptoms of this problem stress the festering nature of the issue and primacy of removing it.
Perhaps the direst symptom is that of an ineffective heterogeneous team which struggles with conflict and takes longer developing goals and norms. Heterogeneous teams can be good when they bring together a varied range of skills and promote creativity (Book), however in this case conflict has arisen between staff resulting from the variance in individual backgrounds. As conflict is so damaging to organisational success (McWhinnie and Esty, 1996), the underlying problem driving the ineffectiveness of the heterogeneous teams must be addressed. A homogenous team in this situation would better address the prior issues as well as creating more efficient co-ordination and performing better on simple tasks.
Anne and other employees have also experienced emotional dissonance within a team environment; a conflict between the required emotions needed for an interpersonal, team-centric role and true emotions resulting from the frustration of clashing cultures (Diamond, 2005). This is an extension of emotional labour, as the frustrated employees have had to internalise their emotions in order to express the larger ‘organisationally desired’ emotions with clients (Van Dijk and Kirk-Brown, 2006)
To a greater extent a symptom of clashing cultures is task conflict, where group members within a team disagree about how tasks should be accomplished and which corporate approach should be employed (DSouza, 2010).
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