Business paper about the cultures of 3 firms
cono4dbr16
1. Background
Every year, Fortune magazine presents their annual “100 Best Companies to Work For.” The main reason why these companies earn a place on this prestigious list is their organizational culture. As you will learn from the readings and lecture, organizational culture is defined as a complex combination of values, beliefs, symbols, policies, stories, and more that are widely shared by employees. Research has shown that a lack of fit between an employee and the culture is a big cause of turnover. As you know, turnover and other effects can be expensive for a firm. But, it can also be expensive in many ways for the affected employee (perhaps you!). So, it’s worth spending time to understand your preferences for various organizational cultures and also to develop skills that help you diagnose if a firm matches with your preferences. This is the subject of Application Exercise #2.
2. Specifics
Part I. This is the easiest part of the exercise (note: easy does not mean quick). First, I want you to do some research on 3 companies that regularly appear on the Fortune list. The first goal here is to familiarize you with some of the various elements of culture. This will help kick start the thinking I ask you to do in Part II. A second goal is to determine if there are any common factors between each of these companies and then to try to match your “cultural preferences” with those of a firm (Part II and III below). With this in mind, please do the following:
o Fortune Magazine annually rates the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S. and they are the recognized leader in this analysis. For example, one firm we looked at early in the term was SAS (a privately-held software firm in N. Carolina). They were rated, #4 in 2015, #2 in 2014, #3 in 2013, and #1 in both 2012 and 2011. They’ve been doing a bunch of things right for a while now. Try to figure out what their culture is all about (e.g., go to their web site, outside reference sources, read their mission, what others say about them, etc.). What are the values expressed by SAS in your view? Be as specific as possible. What exactly do they say and that supports their culture in your opinion? Do you have evidence to support your position/view of their culture (e.g., don’t completely trust a firms’ website – look also for other definitive features of the culture). What other information do you have that provides insight into key cultural values at SAS? Finally, if you don’t remember the video we saw on SAS early in the term is posted here within this assignment (Part 1 = 7.5 min; Part 2 =5.5 min.). But, don’t rely on this video alone!
o Choose 2 more firms from the Fortune list to include in your comparison. Don’t choose another tech firm since you’re already looking at SAS. Among others on the list, you’ll regularly see PwC, Marriott, Container Store, Stew Leonard’s’, Southwest, S. C. Johnson and others. Choose 2 firms from among the 100 and conduct the same analysis described for SAS to characterize their culture (if you’re unsure, choose 1 you’ve heard about or want to work for). I’m eliminating several from consideration: BCG, Nordstrom’s, Ed Jones, & Google.
o For all three firms, be sure to detail and integrate in your company description the aspects/features of organizational culture discussed in the book & class. For example, you may wish to provide some detail about the characteristics or artifacts of their culture (see components such as language, norms, stories, etc.). And/or you may wish to categorize the firms using the profiles of culture noted in our book. Don’t simply wax on about the specific benefits they offer and etc. There are a lot of companies that offer a long list of great benefits, yet their work cultures are very different. Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Army offer lots of benefits, but more importantly what do those things signal about the underlying culture? This is not an assignment on how good benefits/perks are – it’s one on identifying organizational culture. Draw conclusions about what all the characteristics you noted mean about each culture.
Part II. In this second part, I want you to think about the company you’d love to join. (This Part II can be done first or in conjunction with Part I if you like) What would it look like? What characteristics/features might it have? How would it be organized…how would people interact? For this part of the module, I want you to provide a description of the preferred culture of your ideal organization.
How do you know your preferences? There are several ways to determine this. For example, if you’ve had a lot of work experience, you may already know what aligns or fits well or poorly with your preferences. Even then, however, research shows that people aren’t good at parsing out the specific elements of their “fit” judgment. Consequently, I want you to take a culture preference test and use it as your comparison standard (see Resources below for several examples). Alternatively, you can let the Fortune site lead you through an exercise called “finding the right company for you” (dig around for this). Finally, your work in Part I above will be helpful to you here and can be fodder for the characteristics you’d like [examples: how should people be organized, what are their symbols & what do they stand for, how do they train people, what about the physical location, office arrangements, and expected behavior?]. Note: I do not want your innermost thoughts, wishes, and feelings – I want an analysis of you via our course-related concepts & materials.
Part III. For this last part, I want you to put all your research into practice. For your three firms (from part I), analyze how well each might meet your cultural “requirements” (from part II). More specifically:
o Create a chart summarizing how well these companies meet your cultural criteria. You may not be able to complete all the cells of the chart, but if you can’t fill in several for any one company you’ll want to jettison it for another where you can. I want you to directly compare all 3 firms on the cultural criteria and draw conclusions about which you’d join. Explain your table in the body of your paper.
o Initiate some kind of contact with one of the two firms you chose (I’m eliminating SAS as an option here). Describe the contact you had with the firm. What did you do/write and what was their response? Did it confirm or contradict your view of their culture (obviously, you’ll need to ask culture-related questions)? Discuss this in your report. The purpose of this is not to just go through the motions to satisfy this requirement, but instead to get some useful info about culture. If your contact is half-effort/done late/last minute, you’re unlikely to find out anything and will lose points. People have asked for some guidelines:
Don’t use family members or friends; don’t use an earlier contact (you didn’t have the culture knowledge you do now & thus weren’t able to ask detailed/insightful questions); don’t use a place you’ve worked at – I want you to find out something new.
If your first contact is a dead end, then contact another company. Either way, document your contact (I don’t want people bailing out here just because they started late). Just declaring your contact is not documenting it.
For your documentation, think about identifiers: who, when, how (contact method: phone, letter, personal, original-mail & address; their reply; etc.), what you asked and learned via responses, etc. (put this documentation in an appendix; not counted in word limits). I’m grading all this; points are lost here more frequently than I’d like. (Frankly, you’re better off just fessing up and telling me you started late rather than have me searching around trying to replicate your poorly documented contact.)
3. Resources
o Chapter 14 in our book (“Organizational Culture).
o Culture Preference Tests (choose 1 to complete)
Culture Scale (posted on Isidore here – separate file). This is a quick test that will be scored online for you and you can print out the results to refer to later (note: your scores are collected for their database – no ip address captured). Also posted is a file with brief background information on the test (called Culture Scale, background info).
Here’s another culture preference test: http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/011/culture.html (Note: this one’s more complicated/detailed than the one above.)
o Fortune’s most recent ratings of firms/cultures: http://fortune.com/best-companies/
Keep these ratings in perspective....after all, Enron was rated among the top 20 firms before it went under! Likewise, Business Week’s analysis of Tyco and its CEO, Dennis Kozloski was very positive. Up until the last months before the company blew up and Kozloski was indicted, BW was applauding his great leadership skills and his wonderful company.)
4. Write Up
o In summary, you’ll have 3 parts of your write up. First, you’ll present your look at the cultures of 3 firms. Second, you’ll analyze your cultural preferences via a scale and discuss what you discovered. Third, you’ll match up what you know about these firms with your preferences.
o Don’t ‘wing it’ here. Support your write-up with data, cites, scale results, etc. This is not an exercise to know your inner dreams and hopes. Those are important, but not the subject of this assignment. You’re doing a cultural audit of firms, then an analysis of yourself via course-related materials, and then finally putting the two together.
Keep your report to 1500 words or less (not including any title page or appendices you might wish to add). Please use double spacing.
Link to Corporate Culture Preference Scale (Scale #1 in Assign.)
Please point your brower at this link below
You might get a Warning message, but click right through – it’s ok to do so; it’s a publisher’s website).
Give it some time to load (~15 seconds)
http://www.mhhe.com/business/management/buildyourmanagementskills/updated_flash/t opic3a/quiz.html
Assessing Corporate Culture Preferences & Fit Scale #1, Background Information
Purpose
This self-assessment is designed to help you identify to identify a corporate culture that fits most closely with your personal values and assumptions.
Instructions
Open the url and you’ll see that you’re asked to read 12 pairs of the statement in the Corporate Culture Preference Scale. You can quickly choose the option that’s closest to your work preferences. After completing all 12 items, the scale will be scored quickly for you and provide results for 4 different subscale of culture. Then students use the scoringkeytocalculatetheirresultsforeachsubscale. Youshouldthinkaboutthe importance of matching job applicants (including yourself) to an organization’s dominant values.
Comments
The subscale dimensions for this self-assessment were based on the book by M. Woodcock and D. Francis, Unblocking Organizational Values, (Glenview, Illinois: Scott Foresman and Company, 1990). In this book, the authors identify 4 main types of cultures:
· Control Culture: This culture values the role of senior executives to lead the organization. Its goal is to keep everyone aligned and under control.
· Performance Culture: This culture values individual and organizational performance and strives for effectiveness and efficiency.
· Relationship Culture: This culture values nurturing and wellbeing. It considers open communication, fairness, teamwork, and sharing a vital part of organizational life.
· Responsive Culture: This culture values its ability to keep in tune with the external environment, including being competitive and realizing new opportunities.
These four subscales represent a small number of all possible values. No scale is inherently good or bad. Each is effective in different situations.
This scale forces you to give priority to one cultural value over another. It is useful for identifying a preferred dimension. For example, some of you might really prefer all four about equally, but this scoring method tends to produce more distinctive
scores. You might find some comparison data useful for interpreting your scores and that data is presented below here. First is data collected on Australian MBA students, who ranged in age from mid-20s to over 40 years old. Most were full-time employees
(engineers managers, etc.). About one-third were female and most were Caucasian (about 20 percent Chinese, Malay, or Indian). The U.S. MBA sample were an almost equal mix of women and men, mostly in their early 30s. Even though there are subtle differences between these two groups, the important point is that people vary widely in their preference for different cultural values. The control culture has the least dispersed results, but even this dimension has scores across most of the range.
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SURVEY SAMPLE |
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SCORE |
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Control |
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Performance |
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Relationship |
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Responsive |
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Australian MBA Students (n=169) |
Low High |
1=43% 2=28 3=18 4=9 5=1 6=0 |
1=0% 2=9 3=34 4=34 5=19 6=1 |
1=1% 2=6 3=6 4=18 5=24 6=37 |
1=0% 2=0 3=9 4=12 5=30 6=39 |
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U.S. MBA Students (n = 370) |
Low High |
1=33% 2=30 3=23 4=11 5=3 6=0% |
1=0% 2=6 3=27 4=30 5=27 6=9 |
1=3% 2=3% 3=9% 4=27% 5=25% 6=27% |
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