Friday, February 28, 2020

Report on International Business Machines Corp (IBM) Case Study

Report on International Business Machines Corp (IBM) - Case Study Example Firstly, there was the disruptive change on the organization’s culture as a result of the telecommuting. Secondly, there was the problem with the initial technological support. The first issue has been identified by several authors as being a key stumbling for managing successful change efforts (Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990; Heracleous & Langham, 1996; Johnson, 1992; Kotter, 2007). All these authors’ viewpoints are looked at within the report. On the other hand, this report does not find the second issue of problems with technological support to be major because while an organization is implementing change one anticipates a state of flux during which systems and technologies have to experience instabilities. Johnson (1992) defined the cultural paradigm as the core set of beliefs and assumptions, held relatively commonly by management and employees, that are specific and relevant to that given organization and that are learned over time. Telecommuting changed the way of doing things at IBM for example some managers lost prestigious privileges such as private offices with private secretaries and team members became physically dispersed which made inter-team communication much harder. The first issue, the negative impact of telecommuting on IBM-Indiana’s cultural paradigm is analyzed using Johnson (1992) cultural web approach. The second issue is largely a technological issue that has to arise as the organization transitions from one stable organizational system to another. Organizational culture and managing change According to Johnson (1992) culture plays a big role in the development of strategy, the management of the resulting strategic change and also on the choices made by an organization’s leadership that lead up to both strategic development and change. In this case telecommuting presents a major strategic change for IBM-Indiana. The culture web is a tool proposed by Johnson (1992) as a suitable device for conducti ng an organization’s culture audit. According to Heracleous and Langham (1996) the cultural web allows managers to conceptualize the organization either within an interpretive frame of reference (what the organization is) or as a variable in a functionalist frame of reference (something an organization has). The culture web comprises of seven elements: paradigm, rituals and routines, organizational structure, power structures, control systems, symbolic aspects and stories as shown in Figure 1 below. Almost all the cultural web elements were greatly affected by the introduction to telecommuting. With telecommuting employees had to contend with new rituals and routines for example maintaining accurate and up to date schedule of activities on the computer to enable scheduling of meetings and teleconferences. Formalized control systems that monitor and therefore emphasize what is important at IBM, in order to focus attention and activity also had to be changed to reflect the ne w arrangement of partly off-site and on-site office arrangements. Managers who had private offices and private secretaries lost these huge symbolic aspects of being managers at IBM and the loss of group-work setting diminished opportunities for social contact and casual communication that

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

A critique of leadership and team management style in the light of Vip Essay

A critique of leadership and team management style in the light of Vip model and other current theories - Essay Example Few decades back, dynamics of a household were rigidly defined as father entrusted with the role of a bread winner, and the mother assigned to be the housekeeper. It was, most assuredly, regarded a woman’s duty to ensure that her husband and children were well taken care of. However, the shifting social, economical, and financial conditions, along with the increasing cost of living, has vastly evolved the thinking process, and has resulted, in many families, both parents working for livelihood. In addition, the deteriorating family structure, increasing poverty, and decreasing sense of security, has also resulted in children, from an early age, suffering from confidence and self-esteem issues. The severity of this situation can be realized from the fact that between years 2004 and 2008, eight hundred new children centers were inaugurated in UK and thirty percent of them were opened in extremely disadvantaged communities (Siraj-Blatchford and Manni 2007).This highlights the sig nificant role played by the nurseries and other early year’s centers in the support and growth of their respective communities. If a center succeeds in providing a safe, secure, and a neutral learning environment to its children, it not only provides peace of mind to parents, but most importantly leaves an indelible mark on children’s lives, and molds them to become better individuals. As the beginning proverb hints, taking proper care of a child requires a collective effort, which can only be possible with appropriate leadership and guidance. Therefore, to run a successful early year’s center, a manager is required to have certain specific attributes. My interview was based on three themes, which were Vision, Implementation/Operational, and People Manager/Team Management Skills of the managing practitioner. These themes were based on the â€Å"VIP Model,† which was proposed by Mark Hollingworth (2003, p. 34). According to Hollingworth, a true leader is i n fact a ‘VIP,’ which stands for ‘Visionary, Implementer, and a People Manager’. These three primary leadership traits, in the light of other theories as well, will be mostly explored in this portfolio. Various other themes, such as handling parent-staff interactions, curriculum setting, goals of the center, etc. were also considered, but after careful consideration, it was deduced that Hollingworth’s three categories encompasses majority of the themes. For example, parent-staff meetings is a part of ‘people manager’ category, curriculum setting falls in the ‘implementation’, and goal setting is definitely an element of the ‘vision.’ As shown in Appendix A, The format adopted for the interview was semi-structured, consisting of mostly open ended questions. The justification of using this format was to get a deep insight into the mind of interviewee, and to judge his leadership style according to VIP model and ot her contemporary management theories. In addition, the interview was designed and conducted with the intention of â€Å"establishment of rapport, identification of follow-up questions, and avoidance of leading questions’ (Partington 2001, p. 4). The conversation was carried out with utmost neutrality, empathy, and without any judgmental and sarcastic connotations. On the whole, the interview was primarily structured to find out if Mr. John Smith, our interviewee, has characteristics of becoming a VIP. It should be noted that, due to confidentiality, the real names of our interviewee and care center are not revealed in this report. The significance of having a ‘