Working in Organizations

Imagine for a moment that you work for a smallish, moderately successful company of about thirty employees , with its workshop and office in a major city. It makes wooden shelving units and kitchen furniture, and started out as a family firm fifteen years ago. Four members of the founding family currently work there in different capacities . It has a good local reputation for producing quality products and most of its employees are happy to work there. In which country do you think this company is located?

Almost any answer you give will fit the bill, for companies like these can be found in just about any country. So if organizations are of about the same size , need the same sort of expertise, make the same product, but are located in different parts of the world, will there be any differences in how they organize the work of their employees? Of course there will. Even when the end purpose is the same ”in this case to make and sell wooden furniture ”the way the organization is structured, the way jobs are carried out, and the roles of the individuals who work in the organization will all be different, because the ways we manage and conduct business are deeply influenced by our cultural values and the behavior that goes with them.

In Culture A, the managing director of the furniture business is seldom in the office before 10:00 in the morning, and is often away for a couple of hours at lunchtime meeting suppliers and customers. He has two secretaries who attempt to structure his day, answer his correspondence, and whose duties also include making him coffee and buying presents for family birthdays. His employees must go through them if they want to speak to him. The boss knows all his employees personally and will often allow them days off to deal with family emergencies.

Despite that, he keeps a close eye on how they work and makes sure that the supervisor keeps the workers busy, so they don t just stand around chatting. The only person who always seems to know exactly what to do is the one employed to sweep up the wood shavings ”and it s an important job, because the health and safety officials enforce strict rules about the handling of flammable waste. Luckily, one of the family members is married to a relative of the inspector, so they get prior notice of when inspections are going to take place. In an emergency, and out of personal loyalty to the boss, the workforce would come in during a day off to help complete a rush job, but it is seldom that deadlines are regarded as so pressing.

Where are you likely to find an organization like this? The example best illustrates a smaller Latin American organization (although in many respects the description could also fit similarly sized companies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe). Of course not all companies of this size and from this area will follow this pattern, but most will.

In Culture B, the boss and a couple of family members are currently working sixty- hour weeks in the company. They figure it is worth sacrificing time with family and friends now if it means they can win and deliver more orders. The manager doesn t have a secretary, as his priority is to keep costs down. Instead he handles communication with the help of an e-business tool and lots of e- mails . When he goes into the workshop, the employees all call him by his first name and are not afraid to ask him questions or to make suggestions about how to improve their work practices. The boss usually listens to their ideas, and if they are good, he will make sure they are implemented.

In the workshop the employees practice job rotation and everyone is responsible for disposing of his or her own wood waste. Employees are presented with their targets at the beginning of the week and it is their own responsibility to achieve them. The workforce is expected to work weekends if a rush order comes in, and the manager accepts as inevitable the fact that people will move on if they can find a more highly paid job.

Like the Culture A manager, the boss has to take health and safety regulations seriously, and even though his wife is a cousin of the inspector, the company was fined a few years ago for a breach of regulations. If any major decisions are to be made that are likely to result in a written agreement with a customer or supplier, the first thing the manager does is call in the legal adviser ”that s the way they do things here.

Where are you likely to find an organization like this? The answer would be the U.S., although there is much that Scandinavian countries would identify with, like the lack of interest in status and willingness to listen to workers if they can come up with ideas for improvements.

To sum up, culture is the soil out of which an organization grows. Sow the same beans in different soils and the resulting bean plants will look different. The company might not be aware of the way it is affected by the culture it exists in, but the culture is in fact a prerequisite for its very existence and greatly influences the way it develops. It is not surprising that difficulties arise when companies expand across national borders and leaders transplant their nationally influenced company cultures into foreign environments. Getting a company to work well when moved to a new country is not a simple process, and if the difficulties are ignored or underestimated they can lead to the failure of the enterprise.

LETTERS 139 “140

The way a business is organized is affected by the culture where it is located, and both corporate and national cultures affect how individuals work.

A cog in the machine Letter 139

FROM AUSTRALIA ABOUT SPAIN

I am a project leader who has been transferred to my company s Spanish business partners for a year. In Australia I was used to making decisions together with the members of my team and working hard to meet set targets. Here I feel like everyone s kid brother. Everyone has been here for many years, and although they are very kind, I have a set role and fixed responsibilities, and I m expected to confine myself to them. No one seems interested in my ideas or opinions , and there s no sense of urgency about anything.

It sounds as if you have not only swapped one country for another, but that you have also swapped organization cultures. Even when working within the same corporation and the same business area, people in different countries find it natural to work in different ways. You have moved from a task-oriented company used to working in teams , and would probably have found the transition to a U.S. or U.K. company relatively easy, as this way of working is well established in these countries. However, you have moved to what sounds like a more traditional organization common in Western and Southern Europe, where there are fixed hierarchies and set roles. If you are going to benefit from your time there try to look at the advantages of this system. Staff turnover is low, people take a long- term view of their firm s future, as they invest many years of their lives there, and it sounds as if the working atmosphere is good, with relatively low stress levels. See what you can learn over the coming year that you can use to improve ways of working back home. No organization has all the right answers.

Work-life balance Letter 140

FROM BRAZIL ABOUT THE U.S.

I came to work for a company here about a year ago, and will shortly be returning home for the sake of my health. The way the business is organized depends on people spending long hours working overtime, and there aren t enough full-time workers employed. Like many others in my unit, I have been working fifty-hour weeks and taking work home on the weekends. I now feel that I cannot manage any longer.

It sounds like you are wise to leave. However hard most Brazilians or other Latin Americans work, they seldom forget that there is more to life than the office or manufacturing plant, and that time spent with family and friends is time well spent. They share this attitude with Africans and Southern Europeans, but not with most U.S. Americans. This live to work attitude was compounded in the 1980s when many U.S. companies were downsized and entire tiers of management and administrative support staff were eliminated. Suddenly people had to produce their own graphics for presentations and managers were forced to work out their own budgets . Not only that, these changes were followed by the replacement of work processes by project-driven targets, which in turn required enormous efforts by staff and extremely long hours at the workplace.

Of course, overwork is not solely a U.S. problem (as the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the British can verify), but the changes in the work-place over the last twenty years, coupled with the American emphasis on the value of hard work for its own sake, is a combination that threatens both physical and mental well-being. You may have a more balanced and healthier attitude to the work-life balance in Brazil.

LETTERS 141 “143

Corporate headquarters is often the place where major decisions are made. An enormous amount depends on just where the office is located.

Control freaks? Letter 141

FROM FRANCE ABOUT THE U.S.

We are part of an IT company taken over by a big American multinational a year ago, and since then have been bombarded with information about its corporate standards. There is a driving policy, would you believe, telling us among other things to use our seat belts and not to drink and drive (already French national laws). To top it all, we learned on the company s intranet site that it also had a beard policy with guidelines about shape and length. When will headquarters realize that it is dealing with individuals with minds of their own rather than robots programmed to obey every rule?

You don t say in which area you work. A beard policy probably has its roots in some sort of industrial safety guidelines, but what that has to do with IT escapes me. It sounds as if the people at corporate headquarters are doing a good job of alienating many of their non-U.S. employees even though the motives are certainly good. Most U.S. Americans believe it is right that the same rules apply to everyone without exception, and if a corporate rule needs to be applied in Paris, Texas, in the interests of equality it should also be applied in Paris, France. In this U.S. Americans are not alone, and in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland rules and regulations both inside and outside the workplace are enforced across the board.

However, it does seem to be unnecessary to make a great point of enforcing corporate regulations when there already exist identical national laws. The reason can be that the company is trying to protect itself from lawsuits from employees involved in accidents while driving company cars , but I agree that this exercise of corporate power is going to cause antagonism in a country like France, where individuals pride themselves on being unique individuals first and corporate employees second.

As these are corporate standards and they come from HQ, objections to policy coming from one person will stand little chance of being heard . However, if you can find colleagues, and in particular senior French executives, who share your irritation, you could approach HQ together. And you could (tactfully) point to the example of what happened to Disneyland Paris in the 1990s when the Disney organization was taken to French court contesting the company s strict dress code. The Europeans believed the dress code violated French labor law, and as a result the organization restructured its requirements.

Why won t they do as we say? Letter 142

FROM THE U.S. ABOUT INDONESIA

We have recently taken over an Indonesian company and have introduced the same standard reporting procedures that we have introduced in our other subsidiaries. However, we are having problems there in getting employees to follow them.

Traditionally, U.S.-based headquarters have exercised very tight control over the financial side of their business, and this has served as a way of checking the performances of both subsidiaries and individuals. However, you may find that your Indonesian management team is used to thinking in broader terms, prioritizing the building of relationships and the long-term aims of the company over short-term easily quantifiable goals. Perhaps they don t understand the importance of these procedures in the total scheme of things and may feel they have to invest a lot of work in an activity that gives them nothing in return (a favorite complaint of rank-and-file employees about HQ, wherever they are in the world).

Your Indonesian employees will not express their dislike of the new measures openly, for like Chinese, Japanese, Thais, and the citizens of the Latin American countries, they would regard it as unthinkable to come right out and say that a certain management request was unsuitable or unworkable. They would regard this as unspeakably rude, as well as risking open conflict that would result in a loss of face for everyone. Instead, you will find that the work is simply shelved, or directives lost, and you will be expected to draw your own conclusions from this. To avoid this, make the effort to talk to your employees directly, explain why the work has to be done, and ask them if they need any support from you to do it. Remember that in some cultures it is difficult for individuals to tell a superior that they think they have made the wrong decision or that there are problems in implementing some measures, and it s up to managers to use their communication skills to find out where the problems lie.

No help from HQ Letter 143

FROM GERMANY ABOUT JAPAN

We have been taken over by a Japanese company and much of the top management at the new headquarters is now Japanese. The problem is that we now get no directions from them ”they show no interest in us. What I want to know is when they intend to tell us what to do.

One explanation is that you are expecting German-type leadership while your Japanese HQ is expecting you to behave like Japanese managers. If yours was previously a solely German company, you are probably used to a clear chain of command from HQ downward and a clear and unambiguous communication style. So while you are waiting for clear directives, the new Japanese HQ is probably waiting for suggestions and ideas from you who have experience in the field. Japanese executive management is not likely to involve itself in giving direct orders, and Japanese middle managers are supposed to be able to interpret what to Germans might be the rather vague visions of their leaders. Your new Japanese bosses may well be expecting you to do the same, so scrutinize again any information you have already received and try to read between the lines. This sort of process, the attempt to look beyond the words to the thinking behind, is not one that comes naturally to Germans, Australians, Israelis, or U.S. Americans come to that, who are used to taking words at face value.

Another explanation is that they expect business as usual from you for the moment, realizing that they know little about the conditions operating in Germany but that you do. They will be observing and learning about the way you work before making any decisions about changes. For the Japanese it is more important to make a correct decision than a speedy one. However, you should let your opinions be known to your superiors and try to get explicit feedback from your Japanese bosses about what they expect from you.

This situation shows the danger that can follow if a company allows itself to be divided along national lines, with one group of employees having one set of expectations and a second quite another. The Japanese company would be well advised to get some German input at the corporate level before the divide deepens.

LETTER 144

What is a team? Is it people working together with the short-term aim of solving a problem, or a longer-term grouping whose aim is to support its members? And how can you get them to work together successfully?

Teamwork doesn t come naturally Letter 144

FROM SWEDEN ABOUT FRANCE

I ve recently been in France trying to set up a team to deal with customer problems and complaints, but the problems I am encountering give me the impression that working together as a team is not something that comes naturally there.

You are right. You just need to look at the differences in your two educational systems to see where the differences start. In Sweden you are trained to work in teams at an early school age, and teachers ensure that everyone in a group is listened to with respect. The educational system in France, Belgium, the U.K., and the U.S., among others, is more competitive, and individual academic success is the goal of the student. Those values we receive during our schooling will naturally have an effect upon how we think when we start to work.

Teamwork is an accepted way for Swedes to get things done, and most companies work on the premise that the total capacity of a work team is greater than the sum of the capacities of its individual members. In the workplace it implies a flat organization where the managers are also team players, not simply bosses.

However, these principles that are so familiar to Swedes may be unfamiliar to other cultures, and French organizations have traditionally been more formal, centralized, and hierarchical in structure, and the position of manager has meant the individual has become the unquestioned leader of the group. Added to that is the French pride in their own individuality ; they value the fact that they are unique individuals, and if told they stand out from the crowd (or the team) they are likely to regard that as a compliment rather than a criticism. As one rather desperate English manager remarked to me sourly, Getting the French to work in a team is like herding cats.

If you are going to encourage the growth of a Swedish-type team, you will have to get the group s manager behind you and see that he or she starts to delegate responsibility to his or her coworkers, and spends more energy listening to their suggestions about how to improve performance.

IN A NUTSHELL: Working in Organizations

GLOBAL WARNINGS

Companies from the same national culture may still have very different corporate, regional, or professional cultures that affect how their employees work.

Global corporations cannot afford to be ethnocentric. Policies made in HQs that work in the home culture of the corporation may well be unpopular or impossible to implement in others.

 

• Argentina: People like to have a clear work- related structure. They rely on rules and procedures. This is balanced by informal ways of getting around the rules. (See Letters 140 and 142.)

• Australia: Rules have to be understood and supported by employees. They will not be obeyed automatically. (See Letters 139 and 143.)

• Austria: Personal ambition and achievement are important driving forces within an organization. Organizations are hierarchical and change is not welcomed for its own sake. (See Letter 141.)

• Belgium: There is a dislike of uncertainty and risk-taking. This is balanced by informal ways of getting round the rules. There is a preference for a clear hierarchical structure. (See Letter 144.)

• Brazil: Hierarchical organizational structure is the norm. Jeitinho ” the little way round the rules ”is a common way of cutting through regulations and procedures. (See Letters 140 and 142.)

• Canada: They are less competitive than in the U.S. In French-speaking Canada there is more emphasis on rules and more hierarchical organizations. English-speaking organizations are less formal and hierarchical.

• China: Traditionally hierarchical structure is the norm. There are two main types of organizations ”state-owned and private sectors ”but even private companies are not focused solely on profit. Tasks are not usually tightly defined. (See Letter 142.)

• Denmark: Flatter egalitarian organizations are the norm. People are happy working in teams and without many strict rules.

• Finland: See Denmark.

• France: Clear hierarchical and centralized structures are common. Working in teams may be tricky. High level of discomfort with uncertainty. This is balanced by informal ways of getting around the rules ( Le Syst me D ). (See Letters 139, 141, and 144.)

• Germany: Technical specialists have much influence on organizations. Less centralized structures than the French. Procedures and rules are taken seriously. Personal ambition and achievement are an important driving force within organizations. (See Letters 141 and 143.)

• Hong Kong: People are happy working without many strict rules. Tasks are not usually tightly defined. There is a hierarchical system where power and decision-making are concentrated at the top.

• India: People are happy working without many strict rules. Traditionally there is a very centralized management system. There are signs in some more modern organizations of less hierarchy and more risk-taking, trust, and initiative.

• Indonesia: Extended family (patriarchy) is the backbone of most business institutions, and administrative behavior and business structures are hierarchical. Decisions are handed down from the top. (See Letter 142.)

• Italy: Personal ambition and achievement are important driving forces within the organization. There is a hierarchical system where power and decision-making are concentrated at the top. (See Letters 139 and 140.)

• Japan: Organizations are hierarchical, but with a two-way communication flow ( up-down and down-up). Cooperativeness within the group is balanced by competitiveness outside it. People like to work within a tightly regulated system. There is a very low level of employee turnover. (See Letters 140, 142, and 143.)

• Mexico: Personal ambition and achievement are an important driving force within the organization. The business structure is patriarchal and hierarchical. (See Letters 140 and 142.)

• Netherlands: Flat hierarchies are the norm. Teamwork and consensus seeking are preferred ways to work.

• Norway: See Netherlands.

• Poland: Traditionally, Poland has a very centralized and authoritarian management system combined with an assertive workforce. The comparatively new private sector is flourishing.

• Russia: An oligarchy is emerging. There is a handful of extremely rich business leaders with almost absolute power within their spheres of influence (e.g., oil and gas). Traditionally organizations are very centralized. People prefer to work within tightly regulated systems, which is balanced by informal ways of getting around the rules.

• Saudi Arabia: Extended family (patriarchy) is the backbone of most business institutions, and administrative behavior and business structures are hierarchical.

• South Africa: Decisions are made at the top of the hierarchy, but blue- collar unions are a force to be reckoned with. (See Letter 140.)

• South Korea: People prefer to work within a tightly regulated system. There is a very low level of employee turnover. Tradition of family ownership means companies have a paternalistic structure. Hierarchical and centralized organizations are common. (See Letter 140.)

• Spain: See Argentina. Working in teams may be tricky as everyone waits for a superior to take control. (See Letters 139 and 140.)

• Sweden: See Netherlands. Matrix organization is accepted. Specialists are given a lot of autonomy. People are happy working without many rules. Consensus is the accepted way to make decisions. (See Letter 144.)

• Switzerland: See Austria. (See Letter 141.)

• Taiwan: See Hong Kong.

• Thailand: The tradition of family ownership means authority takes a paternalistic form. Hierarchical and centralized structures are common. (See Letter 142.)

• Turkey: People prefer to work within a tightly regulated system, so there are lots of written rules and regulations. These are balanced by informal ways of getting around them. (See Letters 139 and 140.)

• UK: People prefer to work without many rules and written regulations. Instead, individual cases are considered on merit. Personal ambition and achievement are important driving forces within organizations. (See Letters 139, 140, and 144.)

• US: Of the world s richest corporations, U.S. corporations make up 41 percent of the total. U.S. organizational style is internationally influential. Hierarchies are clear and decision-making processes clearly defined. There is a reliance on written rules and procedures. Matrix organizations are common. (See Letters 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, and 144.)

• Venezuela: See Austria. (See Letters 140 and 142.)