Comparison

Companies in todays world strive with their competitive strategies, their prevailing cultural and structure in order to lead their specific industry. Doing a comparison helps understand the difference in operation and culture of the companies. It helps to see how each company's objectives and aims assist them to be victorious. Perceptibly the objectives, culture, structure and operation of each company often vary but definitely there would be certain similarities among them. The two companies selected for comparison are Barking Engineering (BE) Ltd and Oticon. This paper will review both the companies to make a comparison with respect to their organizational culture, structure, motivation and job design.

Organizational culture is the component of assumptions, beliefs and values all of which symbolize organizational behaviour working under the shell of organizational behaviour (Grossi, Dignum , Dastani, Royakkers 2005). Though, they are not directly viewed, however their effects are prevalent all over the organisation. Assumptions correspond to the deepest element of organizational culture since they are unmindful and taken for granted. Same is found in Barking Engineering (BE) Ltd.  Though Barking Engineering (BE) Ltd comprises of around 500 workers of different cultures, but there is not much very health cultural bond exists among them. There is in fact a long history of broken relations between the unions, management and industry workers. The most important problem appears to be the lack of trust among them. There was a number of different views prevailing onto which conflicts arises in BE. And even if complaint is done, the management does not bother to attend the complaint with positive answer. Nevertheless, the worker turnover is elevated at BE, regardless of being positioned in a position of above-average redundancy.

Oticon is distributed with the conventional aspects of a mechanistic structure. The whole environment of the organization is not well-organized. No job titles are there and workers are allowed to do whatever they want or consider suitable at the time.  An organization’s cultural values and beliefs are somewhat simple to interpret than assumptions since people are conscious of them. Beliefs stand for the person’s insights of reality while values are regarded more constant, long-lasting faiths concerning what is vital. However, Oticon’s cultural beliefs and values lack this. They value face-to-face contact without dictating its location or form. Oticon’s organisation structure imitates its own requirements and own culture, and varied practical and tangible constituents which permit the utmost utilization of human capital and knowledge, and simultaneously, raising competence. 

Coming to the organizational structure, Barking has about 493 staff, which are divided into different specialities, for example, the production side, marketing, finance, and human resources. The majority is in the production side and remaining are in the clerical and managerial side. There are two trade unions for plants, namely AMICUS for managerial and clerical employees and TGWU for manual employees. However, BE lacks proper communication. The production manager of the BE is of the opinion that this is annoyance to see the lack of successful communication channels between divisions of the business. Skills of communication have long been acknowledged as a important constituent of every sphere of life and, with several arguing that successful communication is elementary to quality business practice. Addressing communication barriers must be one of the important constituent of an organization. Therefore, Ahmad did desire for proper communication as well as the creation of a more flexible and integrated production system that is more customized to the requirements of individual customers.

Oticon Company was regarded as a bureaucratic one once.  It is divided into vertical and horizontal divisions. The vertical division comprises of six levels of management hierarchy. The horizontal levels are further separated into more division, of which two important includes International (sales) and Electronics (product manufacturing). Both are not communicated properly. There lies a bridge between them. However, within each division, workers have an organised work within specific departments. The company uses its headquarters building containing about 120 staff.  Inside this building there are few formal offices.  Each employee owns a small personal trolley for their individual use.  There is a conference room in the building for teams to meet for analytical solutions and brainstorming.

Certainly, the culture metaphor has a number of strengths, one of which is that it directs concentration to the symbolic importance of almost every feature of organizational life (Zalami 2005). This can be observed in Oticon where a focus on each comprehensive aspect that causes the working flow of the organization explicable via the routines, structures, hierarchies and rules, what are essential for its daily based functionality. Oticon’s organisation structure is a fluid affair with no divisions or departments which can give confidence to local interests, obstruct communications, or make alterations in workloads. 

Modifying corporate culture is not at all times trouble-free because of the resistance against alteration (Montana, and Charnov 2008). Same is the case for both companies Oticon and BE, where not only the management team is tremendously negative but also the workers.

Furthermore, motivation is one of the important aspects behind person’s career and life (Pintrich 2003). It arouses people to accomplish something because People are otherwise dubious to alter a behavior or carry out something special unless they are inspired to do so. Motivation leads people to pay attention on a preferred end-result or objective (Dignum, Meyer, Wieringa, Kuiper 1996). It fuels the determination required to show continued effort on a task. Further, there is a link between job performance and motivation. According to the job performance model of motivation has an influence on the job performance as well as behaviors.

Considering the spur of motivation and job design with regard to both BE and Oticon, variations exists. In BE people are not much motivated though this won’t affect the turnover.  Absenteeism is a very much common problem among the employees of BE. Job design is little change compared to that Oticon. In BE six teams are present comprising 50 and 12 members in each tea. The team are supervised by a  supervisor. Then there is a product co-ordinator’s job. There is a setter as well. There is a project leaders (on the whole, anyone can be a project leader with a convincing idea). they are selected by management team comprising 10 people.

On the other hand, the employees of Oticon appear to be very much active and motivated. Their whole setting pays attention on activity and motion. They prefer for something to ensue.  There are project leaders who have to attract resources and employ people to deliver outcomes.  Then are the employees whose duty is to work according to the agreement of their present project leaders.  Project owners who are basically the management team members give advice and help however makes few definite decisions.  There is a potential issues  of managed chaos’ but still Oticon offers a clear purpose with a definite set of values, which all workers are aware of and abide by.

Thus, both companies mostly differ with respect to various aspects, yet both are still operating successfully. Though, there is some bad aspects in both companies not only at management level but also at employee level, still they try to maintain their position. This is their quality and for which they are still ruling the world.

References

Montana, P. and Charnov, B. 2008, Management (4th ed.), Barrons Educational SeriesHauppauge: NY

Zalami, A. 2005,  Alignment of Organisational Cultures in the Public and Private Sectors, Presentation given at Excellence in Public Service, Amman, Jordan in September,2005

Schein, E.H.1990, Innovative cultures and adaptive organisations, Sri Lanka Journal of Development Administration, 7(2), 9-39

Dignum F, Meyer J-J Ch, Wieringa R, Kuiper R. 1996, A modal approach to intentions commitments and obligations: intention plus commitment yields obligation. In: Brown MA, Carmo J (eds) Deontic logic, agency and normative systems. Springer, London, pp 80–97

Grossi D, Dignum F, Dastani M, Royakkers L. 2005, Foundations of organizational structure in multiagent systems. In: Dignum F, Dignum V, Koenig S, Kraus S, Singh MP, Woolridge M (eds) Proceedings of AAMAS’05. ACM Press, New York, pp 690–697

Pintrich, P. R. 2003, A motivational science perspective on the role of student motivation in learning and teaching contexts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 667–686.