Organizational Culture Of The Chrysler Group

Organizational culture could almost be considered the roots of a company. The way a company’s employees think, the way the customers feel, and the company’s decisions are made are all based around the culture that the company has laid for itself. An employee’s values, thoughts, and actions should reflect those stated in the company’s mission. Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, while both attempting to create a culture that is comfortable and pleasing to their

Lueneburger, Christoph (2014). Lessons from Chrysler: how to rev up a purpose-driven corporate culture. Retrieved from

To understand the organizational culture of a company, one needs to start by looking at the history. Lakeshore Learning Materials was born from a divorced mother of three named Ethelyn Kaplan, who took a dream and a chance by moving her family to California in 1954 to open a toy store. When she started noticing that teachers were interested in her material, Ethelyn realized that she needed to expand her business into educational materials. 60 years later, Lakeshore Learning Materials has grown into a company with over 2000 employees, 60 retail stores throughout the United States and growing. Lakeshore Learning Materials is currently headed by Ethelyn’s grandsons, Bo and Josh Kaplan. Under the supervision of Bo and Josh, Lakeshore continues to be a leader in the Educational Materials, yet still able to keep the family culture that their grandmother started. Highest quality customer service and hard work are the core values that shape Lakeshore’s Organizational Strategy. These high expectations aren’t hard for employees at Lakeshore because the company is so loved by everyone that works there, that they give nothing less than the best.

McCoy’s Building Supply Centers and Chick-fil-A are two 70 years old, successful companies withstanding the test of time. They continue to sustain growth and longevity through economic turbulence, and remain competitive with new and upcoming companies. What is the secret to their success one might wonder? As we examine each company, we begin to recognize the existence of a strong organizational culture. The organizational culture of a company is the anchoring core values, which permeates throughout the company and its employees (Schermerhorn, Osborn & Uhl-Bien, 2012, pp. 9).

When an organization does not use a holistic approach towards their culture, structure and systems, the organization could create a poor working environment for its employees and poor results for their customers. An example of culture, structure and systems not working well together can be seen in General Motors (GM). GM prior to its bankruptcy was seen to be a “highly bureaucratic company in which brands, departments and regions operated like self-governing and competing states with a federation” (Smerd, J. 2009).

Organizational Structure and Culture of Rolls Royce Rolls Royce is a technology and global leader. They employ 35,200 people and operate in 48 countries. Headquarter is based in England UK. Large manufacturing plants are located in American, Singapore and China. A hierarchical structure is used to manage the company.

Before this chapter I thought organization’s culture was only internal and outside factors only affect the brand and sales of the company. But I have now learned a lot more about the

Use the competing values framework to diagnose Chrysler’s culture. To what extent does it possess characteristics associated with clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy cultures?

Prior to Sergio Marchionne’s arrival, it appeared Chrysler Group LLC, organizational culture consisted of reacting “to falling sales by slashing prices” (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2013). Due to reduced sales volume, Chrysler had experienced major financial issues, including bankruptcy reorganization. The observable artifacts that I would suspect prior to Marchionne’s arrival would be massive advertisements endorsing Chrysler rebates, vehicle discounts, and slashed prices. After Marchionne got upset about the sales team “giving away margin”, he had to shake up the organization culture and transform the company’s way of thinking. Chrysler had to do something if it was ever going to get back to a profitable state.

When looking at the case study of Sergio Marchionnes’ takeover of Chrysler and revamp of the corporate culture, it seems to me that Marchionne utilized several mechanisms for embedding the corporate culture that he desired. I feel that Marchionne utilized six of the eleven ways of embedding culture that was covered in the text.

The observable artifacts of the financial downfall of Chrysler were due in part to “heavy discounting in pursuit of high volumes” (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013, p.86). This has become the espoused value in the auto industry for some automakers with the belief it would help them become more financially stable. When Chrysler hired Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, he had to change the company’s observable artifacts resulting in some long term executives being replaced with more recently hired staff. Sergio had to change the culture of employees and the vision of the company in order to have an espoused value of sustainability. Sergio had basic assumptions about the executives he let go, and further confirmed them when he interviewed many of

Chrysler was in desperate need for a lifecycle cultural changeover prior to the arrival of Mr. Marchionne. The company was working on an antiquated system of organizational behavior that yielded little to no results. Mr. Marchionne and his Hierarchy culture approach significantly improved the overall performance of Chrysler and subsequently, led to higher volume of sales and profits. Clearly, control is the driving force within hierarchy culture. (Kreitner, & Kinicki, 2013, p. 70).

After analyzing the story of Lincoln Electric Company I’ve come to the Conclusion that their organizational culture they practicing is People-oriented culture. Because the company values fairness, supportiveness and they respect individual rights. There is a greater emphasis on expectation of treating people with respect and dignity.

Management researchers seem to agree that the things that companies do called "corporate culture" is an intangible concept and hence difficult to define. Among the attempts to define "corporate culture", the following definition is useful as a starting point:- "culture represents an interdependent set of values and ways of behaving that are common in a community and that tend to perpetuate themselves, sometimes over long periods of time" (Kotter and Heskett,1992,141) Peters and Watermann argue that changing a culture cannot be accomplished.

The competing values framework represents a theory, based on the crucial indicators of an effective organization. It revolves around four major components of organizational culture, which measure the organization's leadership style, institutional bonding, strategic emphases and general cultural characteristics. Leaders and managers benefit from this conceptual framework as it offers teaching tools and helps interpret various organizational functions and processes. In order the examine the organizational culture more in depth, this framework has been extended (Quinn and Kimberly, 1984, p 298). They identified the two main dimensions upon which the competing values framework of cultured is based : the competing demand of change and stability, and the conflicting demands created by the internal organization and the external environment. These dimensions were reflected by other scholars as Thomson