Report on International Business Machines Corp (IBM) Case Study

Report on International Business Machines Corp (IBM) - Case Study Example Firstly, there was the disruptive change on the organization’s culture as a result of the telecommuting. Secondly, there was the problem with the initial technological support. The first issue has been identified by several authors as being a key stumbling for managing successful change efforts (Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990; Heracleous & Langham, 1996; Johnson, 1992; Kotter, 2007). All these authors’ viewpoints are looked at within the report. On the other hand, this report does not find the second issue of problems with technological support to be major because while an organization is implementing change one anticipates a state of flux during which systems and technologies have to experience instabilities. Johnson (1992) defined the cultural paradigm as the core set of beliefs and assumptions, held relatively commonly by management and employees, that are specific and relevant to that given organization and that are learned over time. Telecommuting changed the way of doing things at IBM for example some managers lost prestigious privileges such as private offices with private secretaries and team members became physically dispersed which made inter-team communication much harder. The first issue, the negative impact of telecommuting on IBM-Indiana’s cultural paradigm is analyzed using Johnson (1992) cultural web approach. The second issue is largely a technological issue that has to arise as the organization transitions from one stable organizational system to another. Organizational culture and managing change According to Johnson (1992) culture plays a big role in the development of strategy, the management of the resulting strategic change and also on the choices made by an organization’s leadership that lead up to both strategic development and change. In this case telecommuting presents a major strategic change for IBM-Indiana. The culture web is a tool proposed by Johnson (1992) as a suitable device for conducti ng an organization’s culture audit. According to Heracleous and Langham (1996) the cultural web allows managers to conceptualize the organization either within an interpretive frame of reference (what the organization is) or as a variable in a functionalist frame of reference (something an organization has). The culture web comprises of seven elements: paradigm, rituals and routines, organizational structure, power structures, control systems, symbolic aspects and stories as shown in Figure 1 below. Almost all the cultural web elements were greatly affected by the introduction to telecommuting. With telecommuting employees had to contend with new rituals and routines for example maintaining accurate and up to date schedule of activities on the computer to enable scheduling of meetings and teleconferences. Formalized control systems that monitor and therefore emphasize what is important at IBM, in order to focus attention and activity also had to be changed to reflect the ne w arrangement of partly off-site and on-site office arrangements. Managers who had private offices and private secretaries lost these huge symbolic aspects of being managers at IBM and the loss of group-work setting diminished opportunities for social contact and casual communication that