Gore Culture

Culture & Diversity The organization profiled here will be W.L. Gore. The company basically has one product, and it creates its business by applying this product to a number of different consumer items, everything from guitar strings to outerwear to medical equipment and more. The company is able to generate revenue by leveraging its core technology in a lot of different applications by emphasizing the important of innovation in the company culture -- it is critical that all employees are able to contribute to the innovation process at Gore.

The company's culture was defined by the founder Bill Gore, and is based on fostering personal initiative. There are no organizational charts, no chains of command and no predetermined channels of communication (WL Gore, 2014). This creates a unique culture where there is emphasis on the creation of personal networks, collaboration and on personal accountability for creating and maintaining one's role within the organization.

Gore believed that this would encourage the greatest contributions from his employees, and allow the company to mainly hire talented people with the ability to focus on innovation. The result is that employees routinely structure their own teams, and start their own projects. The pervasiveness of this culture means that there are also organizational resources available to employees to start new projects, and there are few formalities or other barriers to such new project initiatives.

This level of empowerment in an organization is unusual, and it can be fairly jarring for employees at first, because they are responsible for setting their own job definition and their own job context (Ford & Fortier, 1995). One of the key points of emphasis in the Gore culture is the role of leadership. Normal organizations have organizational hierarchies and this means that they have leadership-follower dynamics. Gore lacks these, and essentially demands that all employees play a leadership role.

They can determine the extent of their leadership within the context of their self-defined role and within the context of the teams that they create. The company's employees therefore work together to define roles, and there is a high level of emphasis on expert leadership and charismatic leadership rather than formal channels.

This creates a culture that emphasizes specific personality traits, but Gore intended for those traits to be most closely associated with innovation, creativity and high levels of intrinsic motivation, all of which would take his company to levels only capped by the quality of people he could bring on board (Manz, Shipper & Stewart, 2009). The Gore culture was selected by Bill Gore deliberately, but it reflects his own views about how creativity works.

His ideas are unconventional today, much less in the 1950s, reflecting the desire to create a company that functioned like a research team of scientists who worked as equals and defined their own roles within the team. Perhaps the biggest challenge for W.L. Gore was to maintain this culture as the organization passed on to different leaders.

Bill Gore articulated four points to the culture, and the company has been able to maintain its commitment to its culture by remaining under family control -- Gore's son Robert runs the company now -- and the high level of belief that the company's employees have in the culture. The continuity of family management and the commitment of the people within the culture, and the fact that elements of the culture were clearly laid out by Bill Gore, has contributed to the culture's enduring strength (Dyer, 2006).

The leadership style that is best suited to this organization is most likely servant leadership. At WL Gore, the main thing that the leader of the organization needs to do to is to provide the means for the employees to do what they do. Getting out of the way is important, and ensuring that resources are available is also important.

The culture of personal accountability and personal leadership means that there is no real need for strong leadership at the top of the organization, and because there is a high level of organizational buy-in, Gore's leadership needs only to facilitate the initiatives of the employees and their teams, which is basically the role of the servant leader. A decline in demand for Gore's products would be an interesting challenge, because the company is so well diversified.

Arguably, such decline would mean that the core chemical product itself has been superseded in the market. The culture should not change in response to this, however. Gore's culture is built around a high level of motivation and an even higher level of creativity. Such a business circumstance would demand innovation in order to bring more attractive products to market and thereby kick start growth. It is important, therefore, that Gore maintain its culture if such a challenge were to arise.

The culture is oriented towards maximizing the innovation that the company will need.