Critical integration of disciplinary questions in contemporary scholarship

Change

As we will see in the case studies, leadership is a decisive factor in the process of diagnosing and in the implementation of changes in the operation of a corporate organisation. IT, HR and corporate work ethics may be excellent. However, without secure and decisive leadership, the best organisational makeovers can fail miserably.

In this part of the essay, this author will illustrate three models and techniques in the change management professional literature for diagnosing organisations. With regard to this, we will compare and contrast three different diagnostic models/techniques, including the main strengths and weaknesses of each. In this discussion, we will also examine the relationship between each diagnostic model/technique and the organisational development and political approaches to organisational change.

In the first we will consider, a great person and a great organisational management team leads change and the charge, focusing in on areas that needs to be changed. Starbucks corporation provides an interesting example of this and a unique one as well. In 2008, Howard Schultz announced to Starbucks that he was returning to duty as CEO after an eight-year period out of the leadership position. At the time he left, the company was in excellent shape. His return and leadership brought Starbucks stock back to $40 per share (Flamholtz, 2011, 3-4).

During his absence, the company began to have significant troubles. For example, intense competition emerged from Dunkin' Donuts and also other fast-food chains that were entering the market with new coffee products. Additionally, a leadership that had nothing to do with Schultz's exodus or reentry later was that Starbucks had grown very fast. Those very growing pains were now finally taking their toll. The infrastructure of the company represented in the management team/employees were not prepared and trained well enough to execute the Starbucks business plans.

Upon his return to CEO, how did Schultz fix his company's problems? Within two-years of his return to the CEO role, Schultz and his management team reviewed, broke down and repaired what was wrong with the company. Starbucks assessed the "key tangible assets" and after this assessment made the subsequent business changes in the hopes of raising the stock price again and in recapturing their market share. In the opinion of this author, one of the most critical qualities that had eroded was brand name loyalty. The capturing of (as well as the loss of this quality) is complex and comprises a number of not always tangible factors. Suffice it to say, business analysts try to capture this "holy grail" of marketing. They generally do not know how it works (human psychology is extremely complex). However, when it is in motion, one recognizes it working. When it is in play, the customers will follow, much like the children in the Pied Piper of Hamlin. They will follow the company almost anywhere because of this amazing trust in the product or service. It translates into market share which is built upon the purchasing power of customers (ibid, 3-6).

Certainly, this fight to regain customer loyalty was a fight to regain the company mystique and brand character. For example, a major problem was that the critical customer traffic had hit an all-time low in the stores. To combat this, Starbucks combined customer connectivity and innovation and efficiency to attract the customers to the stores and spends their money. They again reached out to their customers by getting them to grind their own coffee beans as they did to begin with. The company had stopped the grinding to save money and time. They realized that a bottomline financial metric messed up the brand loyalty. They developed new products, tried out new concepts and new technology (ibid.).

In the opinion of this author, the upside of the leadership model is unity of purpose and execution. However, when there is a lack of such "great men, " such unity of purpose and strength is lost. This can be seen in the Starbuck's case especially because the same man, Howard Schultz, who had founded and built the company had to return to the helm to lead it to glory.

During his absence, the company began to have significant troubles. For example, intense competition emerged from Dunkin' Donuts and also other fast-food chains that were entering the market with new coffee products. Additionally, a leadership that had nothing to do with Schultz's exodus or reentry later was that Starbucks had grown very fast. Those very growing pains were now finally taking their toll. The infrastructure of the company represented in the management team/employees were not prepared and trained well enough to execute the Starbucks business plans.

Upon his return to CEO, how did Schultz fix his company's problems? Within two-years of his return to the CEO role, Schultz and his management team reviewed, broke down and repaired what was wrong with the company. Dave Ulrich and Ulrich Smallwood spelled out the critical skills to pull off such a refit that called in a Harvard Business Review article, Capitalizing on Capabilities, "key tangible assets." These included talent, speed, accountability, shared mind-set and also coherent brand identity, collaboration, leadership, learning, strategic unity, customer connectivity, innovation and efficiency (Ulrich, and Smallwood, 1-2).

However, are there other factors? Can corporate culture motivate workers to engage in the task of change management and support the leadership team in the project management of the organisational change? Hulya Julie Yazici

in her article in the Project Management Journal, organizational culture contributes handsomely toward such change enterprises and sharing, collaboration, and empowerment of this culture is a must.

The organization's cultural orientation in her research is a contributing factor and perceived organizational performance isCrazily

further defined as project effectiveness and efficiency in order to result in the desired organisational change to bring about enhanced competitiveness and shake down and organisation to improve business performance (Yazici, 2009, 14).

In her survey of firms in the research for the article, Yazici

found that firms with more flexible, change-oriented cultures were associated with higher levels of technology. In addition, such organizational culture s supported the communication and cooperation between company teams team-leader effectiveness was directly associated with team-member satisfaction during the changeover. Yazici found a significant relationship between a positive work environment that supported the strong leadership during the change (ibid, 15).

The advantage of such an approach is significant. Organizational culture can provide significant support to the leadership team in the changeover. However, on the downside, people that are steeped in certain ways may prove to be inflexible in their support of the company leadership if the organizational culture is not as technologically advanced. Such an approach is therefore dependent upon technology to effect the communication that is necessary.

In a journal article by Florence Martin, her analysis of process performance management provides a detailed understanding of the design of a process that is used in the changeover. This article highlights a process performance model aligned with the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) steps of a Six Sigma model and the additional substeps that guide process improvement. The article goes on further to identify this process improvement as one of the best tools in the performance technology toolkit. She further provides recommendations for methods, practices, and tools to execute the Six Sigma model effectively during the organisational changeover

(Martin, 2008, 30-31).

Martin further finds that people and technology cannot do the job alone. A proper process management must also be utilized to bring about the changeover successfully. The culture and the leadership alone are not enough. In this model, the technologists become critical to the success of the changeover. Essentially, they join the list of critical stakeholders who need to be well trained and integrated in the process management (ibid., 31). For this reason the Six Sigma model dictates the integration of these technologists into the process management process (ibid., 32).

Question 2:

Case Study- Office Tigers

In the case study with Office Tigers, the most critical moment in the documentary according to this author is the moment when Joseph Sigelman is encouraging the Chennai office with a peptalk on how the clients are telling them that not only are the Office Tigers services less expensive, but better in quality as well. A key concept here is that the Office Tigers case study overturns is that pay and benefits keep an employee motivated. Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management emphasized the concept that most people work primarily for money. According to Taylor, it is more money that will make them work harder. Taylor is the father of what we know of as scientific management (Taylor, 1911, vii).

The scene where Sigelman is cheering on his troops is a classic case of the "great man" philosophy. While the Indians were hard workers, they were mired in the stereotype of the past which looked first upon Indians as a colonised people. Secondly, in the age of the Internet, they were the butt of jokes about poor quality and people who did not speak English as the their first language getting outsourcing jobs simply because they were cheaper. Instead of this old image, Sigelman gave them the image of "kicking their butts," meaning the opposition of the company in the competitive market. Like some Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton or Robert E. Lee, his troops looked up to him for leadership. They had the IT technology, the skilled workers and the corporate work ethic. They had instituted all of these methods of organisational management change and simply needed good old-fashioned leadership for one more good push to take that hill of customer excellence and amazement and succeed where everyone had said they could not. This intangible quality of leadership that had helped Howard Schultz build and then rebuild Starbucks was what made the Office Tigers of Chennai the special forces of outsourcing that everyone wanted to be a part of. The drive, skills and devotion, of these employees was obviously beyond question to put up with all of the long hours and time away from their families. What was new was the hard-driving American style corporate culture that promised the Chennai workers the ability to make a lot of money in a short time. This mystique allowed them to work and build the company knowing that they were building brand-name loyalty that would keep the company competitive and grabbing market share.

As seen in Office Tigers, the human resources challenges are enormous in this regard. Globalisation influences organizations to compete for customers all over the world with ultrahigh expectations for performance, quality, and cost. Globalisation now exerts pressure on the Human Resource Management (HRM) function in order to adapt to the changing organizational needs, thereby adding greater value (Friedman, 2007, 157). The pressures on HRM are now intense as the Office Tigers case study shows, effective HR managers must develop business knowledge, in addition to what might be called traditional HR content expertise, personal credibility and influence skills. Such HR managers need to be knowledgeable about the law in various parts of the world, are responsible for comprehending many local business practices, HR practices, employment laws, communicating effectively across national borders as well as the gaining of trust among individuals who have a wide range of backgrounds and languages.

Increased pressure is being put on educators in business schools to provide for educating these professionals (ibid., 169).

This of course raises basic questions about what constitutes leadership. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, David Goleman provides a list of leadership qualities that we would recognise in either the case of Starbucks or office tigers. These include a) a person realising their self-awareness by knowing the strengths, drives, weaknesses, values and the impact on others in the organization, b) self-regulation, which is composed of controlling or redirecting disruptive moods and impulses, c) a display of motivation involving the celebration of achievement for its own sake, d) the quality of empathy, which involves understanding other people's emotions, e) self-deprecating empathy for others, e) social skill in dealing with other people and subordinates that helps him to build a rapport with others (Goleman, 2011, 3). A leader is not a dictator. While strong leadership is necessary, its exercise by a manager needs to be judicious and strategic, centered around the mission of accomplishing the changeover in business organization to make the company more successful.

As seen in Office Tigers, cost containment is an issue. Employees (ones who had been working long hours and weekends already) were told that being late cost the company money and lower production. Cost containment is a real issue in globalised companies because performance loss takes energy away from efforts to change gears and update organisational structures. This may cause them to miss out on the performance benefits promised for the great amount of effort needed to actualize the changes (Ye, Marinova & Singh, 2007, 156)

The IT challenges presented in Office Tigers as in any modern global company are considerable and enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology systems is an important issue so that everyone in the company is on the same page. Because of the amount of resources and effort that are expended in ERP, it is critical to make the efforts successful. ERP implementation is not just an IT project. Rather, it is strategic and must be approached as such with a view that integrating applications will impact the entire organization (Aloini, Dulmin & Mininno, 2007, 557).

In both the Starbucks case and also in Office Tigers, there was a deep necessity for a change in a strategy or industry that the leadership was attempting to institute. Initiating new strategies is difficult under the best of circumstances. This is why a central strategy is critical for the organisational leadership to pull off the planned changeover. Due to such issues like new government regulations, growth pressures, new products, technological developments, increased competition and changing workforce demographics in a globalised environment. Such plans allow the leadership of the organization to diagnose a number of issues within an organization, including resistance on the part of employees to the changeover. Resistance can be based upon a number of factors, including a lack of trust building measures reduce the occurrence of this resistance, manipulation and cooptation. Balancing off these strategies will result in the management possibly changing the choice of strategy and the speed of the implementation of the strategy of the changeover scheme (Kotter & Schlesinger, 2008, 2-7).