Basic Challenges of Organizational Design

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1. List the reasons why Southwest’s and Value Line’s cultures differ so sharply. First, let’s break down key points of each organizations culture. Southwest’s organizational culture is strengthened by having employees and managers that are committed to the success of the organization and do everything they can to help one another. They take this commitment to the organization provide customers with the best service possible (Jones 2013). Southwest also has a flat organic structure which is informal in nature. This informal norm inspires innovation and allows managers to encourage their employees to create and develop rules and norms to come up with solutions. Southwest also has a large amount of employees that own stock in the company, making contribution to performance self-fulfilling. Then you have Value Line, which displays a more centralized, tall organizational structure. The decisions that Jean Buttner made as CEO created a culture that employees detested. The CEO wanted to reduce costs and improve efficiency, but at the cost of the satisfaction of the employees. She made employees sign in and sign out, with strict rules if they broke, they would be terminated. The impression that a messy desk is a sign of employees being unproductive, lead to the creation of the clean surface report. This report restricted creativity and innovation while also alienating the employees, giving them a sense of non-ownership or having no personal space in the organization. All of these acts devalued the employees, causing high turnover and customer dissatisfaction. Management and the employees were unable to create a culture of cooperation, creating an Us vs. Them mentality. These organizations culture differ so sharply from one another can be linked to how they structure the organization, the property rights given to the employees, ethics within the organization, and the

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