Coloplast A/S organization challenges in off-shoring
Name:
Houssam Khawajkyia
Date:
Friday, July 18, 2009
Executive summary
Coloplast, an international company which specializes in developing, manufacturing, and marketing medical devices, implemented an off-shoring strategy in order to be different, stay competitive and meet the dynamic market needs. In implementing this strategy, Coloplast had several issues and the first was the organizational structure. Due to changes in the organizational structure of its Danish and Hungarian production plants, misunderstandings arose between employees which resulted in serious of organizational and managerial challenges. However, the management resolved these differences through
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An initial plan to train the Hungarians employees in Denmark failed due to complications arising from Danish unions. However, this challenge was solved through Danish employees training their fellow employees at Hungary, Tatabanya (Nielsen, Pedersen, & Pyndt, 2008). Knowledge management was also affected by a difference in the organizational culture of the Hungarian employees and Danish employees. Since Hungarian employees had worked in multinationals which had different organizational cultures, some employees tended to act passively or simplify instructions excessively. This made the Hungarian workers’ skills to be underestimated and it also created some misunderstandings. Danish workers could also not learn useful skills from their Hungarian counterparts due to this challenge.
Employee motivation and communication When the management at Coloplast formulated plans to relocate to Hungary, this posed a threat to employee motivation. This is due to the fact that many employees become de-motivated whenever there are imminent changes in an organization due to opposition to organizational change. The Coloplast management recognized this fact and ensured that all employees had access to information about the impending relocation in order to reduce anxiety among them. The management was honest and open about the forthcoming relocation, and it ensured that it obtained feedback from
Employees did not take well to a formalised structure of routines on how to perform their tasks, and as a result the program proved difficult to implement. This system had been trialled and proven in numerous other multi-national firms, however it was not the best way for Danone to operate. Danone employees did not use portals to share information and felt most comfortable talking to each other. “Systems and processes slowed down the business” (Edmondson et al, 2008 p.8) Each company has its own culture, consisting of shared beliefs, values, ideologies and norms, that is shaped around the company’s strategy, structure and internal and external environments (Soo, 2008). It is critical for management to understand the company’s culture in order to successfully develop a system of knowledge sharing, especially in a company that operates in 120 different countries.
Almonaitiene, J. (2011). Motivating Employees in Small and Medium Business Enterprises in the Context of Intense Workforce Emigration. Social Sciences, 72(2), 7-15.
The first part of this essay will introduce the theoretical synthesis of why employees resign from their jobs based on the Eight Motivational Forces (Jr & Griffeth 2004). The second part of this essay will discuss the consequences to the organisation left behind by the employee. The third part will then focus on strategies for organisations to retain their highly talented and motivated employees.
It is hypothesized that cultural differences in behaviour will mean differences in HRM practices within different cultures but those within the same cultural cluster will be similar whereas those in different clusters will be dissimilar. Employees and managers from different cultures take decisions in different ways – the processes, behaviours and values are not the same. People have different value orientations as a result of individual psychology, life-stage and generation and assumptions about behaviour determined by cultures are linked to a variety of organisational behaviours.
Employees are indispensible to an organization. Personnel management, now known as human resource management (HRM), ensures that an organization produces maximum output with the greatest efficiency. The role of HRM covers selecting and hiring the right employee, training and retaining talent, wage dispensation to maintaining employee relations (Nankervis et al, 2011). In this essay, we will be looking into a case study of HRM in Brunei and will cover three topics. Firstly we explore how culture affects the way a country runs its economy, its legal and political system, and how they adapt to technology. Next, we discuss how HRM allows individual employees to acclimatize themselves to technical differences in an organization.
Alison or Cabletronica didn’t do any kind of motivational analysis. Will employees accept the change? What is the predisposition of employees toward the change? Will they support or resist it? This is the single most important question to assess the organization’s readiness for change because high motivation leads people to acquire the needed skills and to exert the extra effort that contributes to success.
Traditional expectations hold that, when one is young, it is impossible to be knowledgeable and have the necessary experience and competence to manage successfully.
They do not hire based on skills, but on attitude, fit and importance of culture
The subsequent resignations and layoffs of employees emphasizes on the diminishing motivation among employees. This relates to Herzberg’s Dual Factor theory of motivation (introduction of job dissatisfiers) and how structural changes in organization can be a barrier to motivation.
An organization’s culture governs day to day behavior. This type of power may be seen as a control mechanism, which businesses use to manipulate internal and external perception. Every organization has a set of assumed understandings that must be adopted and implemented by new employees in order for them to be accepted. Conformity to the culture becomes the primary basis for reward by the organization. “The role of culture in influencing employee behavior appears to be increasingly important in today’s workplace, as organizations have widened spans of control, flattened structures, introduced teams, reduced
Codman & Shurtleff is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson which supplied hospitals and surgeons worldwide with over 2,700 products for surgery. Codman is now facing a profit shortfall of two million. A series of actions was decided in order to recover the shortfall, while the decisions made were somehow not aligned with J&J’s group philosophy. Codman managers decided to cut budgets of R&D expenditure which might have negative effects on the long term performance of the firm. The management of Codman ought to choose a better way that has a positive effect on operations in the long run and use a formal process, “stage gate”, in new product development.
The most recent studies in cross-cultural management reveal that the culture is a very expansive subject for organizations to study, especially for organizations, which hire the most diverse workforce. One definition of a diverse workforce could be as the one, which comes from different ethnic and demographic backgrounds (Plessis, 2011). For studying culture of the diverse workforce, there are two parts to study, the implicit and the explicit culture. The explicit culture includes behavior while the implicit part involves norms and values of individuals (Guang & Trotter, 2012). The explicit culture is already known when workers stay and work in a firm for a length of time, but the most difficult is to understand the implicit culture which is obscured in form of norms and values of the workers. Due to the differences of cultures, workers hold a great potential of variance, variety in terms of their explicit and implicit parts of the culture. The
Internal and external perception of organizations develops from leaders creating and managing culture, the behavioral norms within particular industries, and influential subcultures. Organizational culture contributes to the approach and method used to train and develop employees of organizations. Sidestepping organizational culture and cultural diversity while developing and administering training programs inhibits the effectiveness of the training by not addressing company culture and individual perspectives of employees.
Rapid changes in the global economic market entail transformations affecting not only the external environment of organizations, but also its internal operations and processes (Hall, 2008; Hodgetts, 2002). One important change that has altered the nature of contemporary organization is the “acknowledgement, development and systematic use of the skills and knowledge of employees” (Ramirez et al 2007, p 496). The central role of employees’ participation in the success of the organization involves not only “high performance work systems… [but] they also involve the decentralization of decisions and work enrichment that is providing employees with opportunities for involvement in decision-making and innovation.” (Wood & de
Employees are indispensible to an organization. Personnel management, now known as human resource management (HRM), ensures that an organization produces maximum output with the greatest efficiency. The role of HRM covers selecting and hiring the right employee, training and retaining talent, wage dispensation to maintaining employee relations (Nankervis et al, 2011). In this essay, we will be looking into a case study of HRM in Brunei and will cover three topics. Firstly we explore how culture affects the way a country runs its economy, its legal and political system, and how they adapt to technology. Next, we discuss how HRM allows individual employees to acclimatize themselves to technical differences in an organization.