Studyspark Study Document

Culture Analysis at a Software Company Research Paper

Pages:5 (1573 words)

Sources:5

Subject:Business

Topic:Organizational Culture

Document Type:Research Paper

Document:#44019185


Culture Analysis Paper

Company Overview

I’m studying a software company that shall be known as K. K is not based in Silicon Valley, but elsewhere in the US, with offices around the world. K sells SaaS products in the B2B market and has sales in the hundreds of millions, and over 1000 employees. This company has also acquired several small firms in recent years. Integrating all of those individual cultures into a cohesive one has been one of the organization’s biggest challenges. This paper will outline the culture at K via primary sources, supplemented with secondary source material on organizational culture theory.

Primary research consisting of several employee interviews revealed some challenges, especially the domains of underlying assumptions and values. There is a lack of artifacts that provide meaning, which is another problem that will need to be resolved.

Primary Research

As I know people who work in this company I was able to conduct a few interviews and get a sense of what the culture is like. At the baseline level, K has a culture that blends some of the classic software company culture with a more East Coast business culture. The former is manifested in a fairly casual office atmosphere, and perks that would be familiar to most tech employees. The people interviewed found the company fairly progressive at the lower levels in terms of things like social norms and diversity. At the higher levels, where the senior leadership are older, the culture veers more towards a workaholic old white male culture. Some of that trickles down to the other levels of the company, which results in the curious blending of tech startup culture and old school business culture.

The different companies that have been acquired in recent years have been maintained as distinct business units in order to maintain the aspects of their cultures that made them successful. For some of the employees interviewed, this was seen as a positive because they felt that they were successful companies in their own right and that should be respected. Further, there seemed to be a general understanding among interviewees that it would be difficult to simply impose the parent company’s culture on the acquisitions, at least it would be difficult to do so quickly. However, some interviewees did note tensions where some of the individual cultures within the organization clashed, either with each other, or with the culture of the parent company.

Interviewees also noted some confusion about the overall cultural identity of the organization. Some suggested that they weren’t sure there was a coherent culture, others thought it might be dependent on individual departments. If this is true, it presents a challenge for senior management. It could be that the gap between the culture of the senior management team and the younger workers who make up the bulk of the staff is the originator of these tensions,…

Some parts of this document are missing

Click here to view full document

…issue within K culture. The multiple acquisitions and generational tensions leave the company with a muddled sense of what its organizational values really are, and that appears to be resulting in some tensions, especially among employees in the acquired companies. Finding ways to reconcile the different value systems within the company should be a priority going forward, in order to retain the highly skilled younger workers at the heart of the company’s software products.

The relative lack of artifacts is evidence of a company that is still finding its way. Where there are tensions, such as those around values, it is important for a company to have artifacts to latch onto. Better development of cultural artifacts – anything from slogans to mascots would be a good starting point – would help to resolve tensions and to build a better sense of overall organizational culture. Without these artifacts, employment at K becomes more transactional for the majority of the workers, something management may wish to avoid.

The underlying assumptions of management appear to be that they can apply their own cultural norms to the rest of the company and that is probably a mistake, because they are mainly different from the workforce. The underlying assumptions of the culture are rooted outside of the technology sector, but the company competes with other tech companies for talented young workers. If the assumptions of K’s organizational culture were better aligned with the needs of these workers,…


Sample Source(s) Used

References

Chambers, K. & Honeycutt, A. (2009) Telecommunications mega-mergers: Impact on employee morale and turnover intention. Journal of Business & Economics Research. Vol. 7 (2) 43-52.

Dencker, J., Joshi, A, & Martocchio, J. (2007) Employee benefits as context for intergenerational conflict Human Resource Management Review. Vol. 17 (2) 208-220.

Lund, D. (2003) Organizational culture and job satisfaction. Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. Vol. 18 (3) 219-236.

North, M. & Fiske, S. (2015) Intergenerational resource tensions in the workplace and beyond: Individual, interpersonal, institutional and international. Research in Organizational Behavior. Vol. 35 (2015) 159-179.

Yamanoi, J. & Sayama, H. (2013). Post-merger cultural integration from a social network perspective: A computational modeling approach. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory Vol. 19 (2013) 516-537.

Cite this Document

Join thousands of other students and "spark your studies."

Sign Up for FREE
Related Documents

Studyspark Study Document

Software Application Process

Pages: 4 (1329 words) Sources: 4 Subject: Business - Management Document: #26942954

Software Application Process for a Clinician Provider Order Entry (CPOE) system Software Application Process Clinician Provider Order Entry (CPOE) System The planning, customization, launch and continued use of a Clinician Provider Order Entry (CPOE) system in a local hospital forms the foundation of this analysis. The processes being used prior to the systems' planning and implementation are detailed to provide a basis of comparison of system contribution and performance. A timeline of the

Studyspark Study Document

Software Recommendation Argot International Technology

Pages: 6 (1994 words) Sources: 10 Subject: Business Document: #61760202

Introduction of the new technology will also means new job requirements as well. People are resistant to change by nature, but these changes are necessary to ensure that Argot gains and maintains a competitive edge long into the future. Management needs to stress the necessity of these changes to employees and assist them in making a smooth transition. Technological changes will require changes on many levels, not just in hardware

Studyspark Study Document

Company or Organization, Preferably the

Pages: 15 (5736 words) Sources: 4 Subject: Business Document: #77120086

The exponential growth of the Internet has also served as the catalyst for the growth of highly collaborative, interactive forums and platforms on which Delphi-like brainstorming can be accomplished (Decker, Wagner, Scholz, 2005). Conversely many of the external relationships companies have and that are essential to understanding how the strategic planning process will impact an organization lend themselves to quantification. An example of this level of quantification of external

Studyspark Study Document

Software Testing Class Identification Date of Submittal

Pages: 6 (1736 words) Sources: 5 Subject: Business - Management Document: #23962804

Software Testing Class Identification Date of Submittal Current Trends in Software Testing The continued growth of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and virtualization technologies in conjunction continual improvement in the automating of the Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) processes are defining the future of software testing and quality assurance. The most rapidly evolving trends in software testing include the defining of PDCA-based automated testing networks and Testing-as-a-Service predicated Cloud Computing-based platforms (Nakagawa, Ferrari, Sasaki, Maldonado, 2011).

Studyspark Study Document

Software Proposal the Contemporaneous Business

Pages: 10 (2796 words) Sources: 3 Subject: Business Document: #36618989

The methods at the basis of the software project refer to the following: 1. At a marketing level, the CRM software platform enhances communication possibilities with the customers at all interaction points. 2. At a sales level, the software platform would allow our company to gather and process valuable information on productivity needs, such as size of product line or specific characteristics desired. The data would easily find applicability and functionality

Studyspark Study Document

Culture in This Briefing New Employee Human

Pages: 8 (2541 words) Sources: 2 Subject: Recreation Document: #73785062

Culture In this briefing new employee human resources, we will be considering cultural management issues in the tourist industry and how they impact upon our business. Our company, Beach Bum Ltd. is a travel consultancy Agency which was recently hired to provide a critical analysis on whether or not sustainable tours can attract American ecological tourists to travel to countries such as Tanzania and Namibia. We are a culturally eclectic group

Join thousands of other students and

"spark your studies".