Organizational Culture and Organizational Design - Case Study Example

Organizational Culture Name Institution Date Organizational Culture: Altium Ltd Introduction According to Logan (2009), culture is an understanding shared by a group of individuals. Likewise, Ravasi & Schultz (2006) argued that organizational culture is a pattern of shared mental suppositions that steer understanding and actions within organizations through defining suitable behavior for different circumstances. Normally, organizational culture affects workers’ identification with a company and also the culture construes a team effort and importance of the sharing similar beliefs and advancing the belief (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Logan (2009) further explains that organizational culture refers to how people behave in an organization and the meaning that they relate to their behaviors. Culture includes the organizational collective values, habits and beliefs of organizational members and the culture is also defined by aspects such as history of the company, product, market, technology, and strategy, kind of workers, management style, as well as national culture. Culture is also a set of shared behaviors and presumptions that are taught to new organizational members as a means of identifying with the organization. Basically, organizational culture influence how individuals and groups interact with each other, with customers and with stakeholders as well (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). This paper will analyze the organizational culture of Altium Limited. Organization Overview Altium Ltd is an Australian software company that develops and sells computer software for the design of electronic products. The company’s headquarters is in Australia with sale operations in Australia, America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, China as well as Asia Pacific which means that Altium is an international company. The company’s core business involves developing electronic design automation software products and these products traditionally have been offered on costly UNIX based mainframe systems. Altium Limited's long term strategy is development of desktop software covering various electronic design technologies that are can be used easily and are affordable as well. The company earns most of its revenue overseas. Altium Limited is a company that grew rapidly within a very short time, that the company’s management found itself not being able to maintain its operations and finances under control. As a result, the company has been forced to reexamine and revamp its organizational culture along with the structure to avoid getting bankrupt. Altium Ltd organizational culture is one of change where the culture is ingrained in outperforming and succeeding. The company’s structure has also changed to be more competitive in an important stage within the company’s history. Altium Limited also maintains its culture on the simple terms of innovative and altruistic though which supposed to be shared and followed. Basically, the company’s culture is team oriented, collaborative and encourages individuals to think non-traditionally; different from where they were working before, upholding integrity and working for the good of the organization and the world at large. Altium Ltd follows the strategies of the global market and hence the company clearly understands that organizational culture needs modification according to the national and global culture to make the company to be among the best companies in the industry. The company recognizes the increasing globalization and hence it aligns the values and performance of the workers with the organizational strategy and manipulates culture to attain organizational goals (Sagie, & Elizur, 2008). Nature of Culture in Altium Limited The culture of Altium Ltd was based on the principle that self-motivated people work harder when they do not have a boss that micro-manages each action. The company’s culture is also based on innovative talents, flexibility, quality orientations, along with market focus of the company and its workers. The organization’s human resource strategy has an outline and set of conditions established to encourage the development of the performance drivers (innovative talents, flexibility, quality orientations, along with market focus of the company and its workers) and makes sure that the potential is transformed into reality. This strategy aligns with the company’s well established tradition of appreciating its workers and is among the company’s key organizational value; “The Company is Successful because of our Employees”. The exceptional culture of Altium Company has facilitated the growth of the company and has also enabled the company to respond more rapidly to changes as compared to its competitors. The reason why Altium is able to respond rapidly to changes is that it is much simpler to have a project started when there just few individuals to approve projects. At first, the company grew rapidly since decisions were decided at the lowest possible level. The company headquarters developed a policy and administered all activities, although the local workers decided on daily decisions on ground in all overseas countries where the company operates. The form of top-down beliefs facilitates fast responsiveness and resolutions to events without having to involve the organizational headquarters and therefore the company has been able to avoid organizational red tape (Mc Shane & Travglione, 2005). People are the backbone of Altium Company. The culture of the company is that it hires individuals who are professionals, determined and the company focuses on the ability and smartness of the employees. Even though all the company employee share common organizational goals and vision, the company hires diverse workers, who come from different cultural backgrounds, speak diverse languages, which reflect the global audience that the company serves (Coutler, 2003). The company always maintains open culture where each and every employee’s contribution is valued and hence everybody is free to share ideas and opinions (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). For instance, during the company’s fortnight meeting, the management directly asks employees questions regarding a wide range of matters. In addition, the management openly communicates with workers via email or in company’s café regarding issues that affect employees and sharing of ideas as well. More importantly, Altium Company’s offices and cafes have been designed to promote interactions among all employees and across various teams and management and to encourage conversations regarding work and other issues such as team building outings as well. As mentioned before, Altium also focuses on creating a sense of community with the company through celebrating and building amity. The company emphasizes on this because everybody needs space for gathering experiencing events as groups. These spaces promote connectivity and shared behaviors that develop the experience of the people in such places (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). In addition, gathering spaces at Altium are deemed to be very significant where the organizational management cherishes and protects the key strategic spaces. Altium has several big rooms that are exclusively dedicated to all-hands meetings, as well as indoor and outdoor adaptable spaces. In addition, the company obviously acknowledges that human beings normally gather where there is food and hence the company has built large dining halls and cafes where all employees gather in more informal conditions (Burton, 2009). Basically, there is power in providing individuals with an opportunity to convene and gather for fun, celebrations, honoring, collaborating and relaxing as well because people are able to relax, mingle, exchange ideas and enhance collaborative spirit (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). Leadership According to Sadri (2010), organizational leaders play an important role as workers follow what the leaders focus on and to what the leaders give importance. How leaders respond to issues or crisis indicates elements of the culture and the manner in which leaders behave underpins the values that support the organizational culture (Sadri, 2010). Accordingly, Altium’s management plays an important role in the daily activities of the company. The company’s leadership has created a culture that is deeply rooted in delegation. The leaders encourage workers to freely speak their mind and air their opinions freely from the first day they are hired. In addition, the company conducts even decisions typically preserved for administration via a collaborative process. This has in turn built a collaborative culture among the company’s employees (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). The employees also freely share their knowledge which has greatly contributed to the success of Altium because the company’s smart and able employees voluntarily share their skills, knowledge and innovative ideas (Burton, 2009). More importantly, the company’s workers have autonomy, yet through a regime of single unifying values. Altium is a dynamic and a very competitive company and readily learns from its mistakes and that of employees as well which absolutely complements the company’s internal collaborative structure (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). Basically, workers emulate the leadership behavior. Workers are also guided by the provision of rewards and punishments which is used to communicate the desired organizational behavior. In view of that, leaders at Altium regularly communicate organizational issues and offer a focus for attention. The leadership does not talk to group of workers without mentioning the organizational values and indicates unless the values are crucial to the leadership and indicates that the significance of the values will not be important. The leadership at Altium considers it crucial to live by the core set of values and frequent administrative meetings are held to communicate the successes and failures of the company which are then communicated to all employees (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). As a result, leaders at Altium have been successfully been able to set up cultural change through replicating the behavior they wish to promote, then emphasize the desirable organizational culture with visionary statements, celebrating worker’s promotions and successes as well as recruiting people from diverse cultures and successfully modeling them to be compatible with the company’s culture among other things (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). This has enabled the company to establish a positive culture which has been a prerequisite for the company’s success and has also offered the company a competitive advantage because the positive culture facilitates recruitment and retention of skilled and top-quality employees. The organizational culture greatly promotes the morale of the workers which in turn has improved the workplace culture making worker’s experience happier and this hence results to improved productivity of the employees and consequently improved profitability for the company (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). Altium maintains a casual and autonomous atmosphere which makes collaboration of all organizational employees from all levels possible. Altium never emphasizes on middle management and top management and hence all managers almost belong to the same category. The organizational teams normally include members of equivalent authority and a specific level of autonomy and democracy is maintained. This has enabled the company to have a highly collaborative culture and there is no top-down hierarchy in the company which further promotes collaborative culture among all organizational members (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). Some of the unique cultural aspects at Altium include local touches in different company locations which expresses each company’s offices’ unique location and personality, massage chairs, double rooms with about five team members, recreation facilities, social groups of all types, healthy and diverse food at the company’s cafes as well as snack and drinks to keep the company workers throughout the day. Basically, all these efforts from the company are worthy it and have produced remarkable results because the Altium culture has been positive, influential, all-inclusive, productivity-promoting atmosphere which in turn has contributed to the company’s constant success (Robbins, 2005). Recruitment of Staff Recruitment of new employees at Altium is collaborative where even the employees are involved. When a person applies for a job at Altium and is deemed qualified, the information gathered regarding where the person schooled or worked in the past is parsed and stored within the (Applicant Tracking System) ATS system. This system matches the information to other information regarding the company’s employees with similar information. The company then utilizes the ATS to request employees to evaluate applicant who have presented their Curriculum Vitae through the company’s website. After matching the information, an email routinely requests workers for internal references where workers can reply through the email and hence the system is updated. Consequently, this enables the human resource department that is responsible for recruitment to tap personnel that best understands the demands of the work in the company and the nature of the culture in evaluating the fitness of potential employees. As well, this recruitment process enables the current company’s workers to build the community even though they are not formally part of the official interview procedure which further promotes an open and collaborative culture in the company (Burton, 2009). Following a successful recruitment of the new employees, they function within loose teams within a relaxed environment depicting the collaborative culture in the company which is combined with the methodical nature of Altium task-based computer design systems to encourage collaborative discussions of each and every detail in the work. Even though the workplace atmosphere is casual, there are big expectations from the employees where the organizational workers are easily able to fulfill these expectations due to the encouraging working environment and the positive culture in the organization (Dalglish, & Miller, 2010). As Mc Shane & Travglione (2005) explains, the culture such as the one at Altium Company is fit perspective and hence it is good because it fits the industry as well as the company’s strategy. This is because in the industry, the competitive atmosphere, customer prerequisites and social prospects might determine an organizational culture. Altium Company operates within a very competitive atmosphere and hence the company developed a strategy that supports employees as well as the customer focus through the worker’s behaviors, diversity of the products as well as segmentation. As Sadri (2010) suggests, an organizational culture that promotes confidence and risk-taking among workers has leadership that generates changes and concentrates on the changing needs of customers which is very evident at Altium Company and thus the company also upholds adaptive culture. This culture has been so important for the company since the company operates in an extremely turbulent environment of constantly changing technologies where the company should adapt constantly. Altium Company operates within a very turbulent atmosphere where innovation and entrepreneurial activity, creativity and risk taking for the employees and the entire company at large have enabled the company to have a competitive advantage (Spiros, 2010). Conclusion The value of organizational culture is that important features of day to day activities with individuals are isolates and the culture thus offers specific beliefs on interrelation of the human context. For Altium, people are an important resource for the company. A positive organizational culture like the one at Altium thus leads to improved productivity, recruitment of individuals who perform at full potential, collaborative atmosphere, open and autonomous culture as well as rewarding of employees for their performance. Altium’s success is directly tied to the open, collaborative and innovative culture in the organization as well as the positive culture from the company’s leadership. The collaborative and all-inclusive culture and happy environment in the workplace is what has greatly contributed to the growth and profitability of the company. As seen in the case of Altium Company, environmental elements are progressively the need for effective leadership within the current organization where for leaders to be able to better guide, manage and motivate workers, the leaders need specific skills and proficiency in behavioral to instill positive culture in companies. References Burton, R. (2009). Organizational Design, step by step approach. Cambridge University Press. Coutler, M. (2003). Management, (3rd edn). Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education Australia. Dalglish, C., & Miller, P. (2010). Leadership: Understanding its global impact (1st ed.). Prahran, Vic: Tilde University Press. Logan, D (2009). Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. New York: HarperCollins. Ravasi, D & Schultz, M. (2006). Responding to organizational identity threats: Exploring the role of organizational culture. Academy of Management Journal, 49(3), 433–458. Robbins, P. (2005). Organizational Behavior (11th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Sadri, G., (2010). "Developing corporate culture as a competitive advantage", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 20 No.10, pp.853. Sagie, A., & Elizur, D. (2008). Work Values: A Theoretical Overview and a Model of Their Effects. Journal of Organisational Behaviour. Vol. 17, pp.503-14. Spiros, R. K. (2010). The Science and Practice of Team Development: Improving the Link. Academy of Management Journal. Vol.44, pp.376-92. Travaglione, T. (2005). Organizational Behavior on the Pacific Rim. Sydney: McGraw-Hill. Read More