Organizational Development

Organizational Development

Scenario

An international organization in the casualty and property business has recently purchased a health maintenance organization which is focused on insurance and healthcare. This organization merged with another organization which provides financial investment, pension insurance, and life insurance business. This merger would cause a lot of issues to the managers since they both had very distinct cultures. One company had an entrepreneurial culture while the other had a process driven culture. In order to successfully lead the business towards profitability, the new business needed to have a culture which had to be implemented worldwide.

In order to gain the confidence of shareholders, managers had to rethink the policies and culture of the new company in order to create a positive perception in the mind of investors and shareholders (Change management, n.d.). It is always difficult to lead a merged company on the road of success since it is quite easy for the company to run into a loss due if the new policies and concepts do not work.

Response 1

The diagnosis of the problem is the first step in developing a way to solve it. It starts with the collection of data. This data is gathered from employees and managers in order to determine the way people in the organization like to work (Chastian, 2011). Since the company is a merger, there will be two schools of thoughts. The idea of the diagnosis is to find points of similarities and points of differences. Points of similarities will show managers the areas that will lead to employee satisfaction. Merging the cultures in order to improve the efficiency can be a daunting task if employees go against the new concept. Therefore, during the merger and changing of culture, the people who should be taken into consideration are the employees (Francis, 2007).

In order to merge competing cultures the managers will have to take the employees into consideration and develop cross-functional teams whose posts are integrated. This will help the employees to develop and reshape the culture. The process will be automated as the two cultures will merge to form a new culture. Where leadership is concerned, a hierarchical system will work best as this is common in both cultures. During the process of changing the culture, the employees should be carefully monitored in order to avoid any problems and solve them as they come up (How to merge corporate cultures, 2011).

While planning to develop the culture of a merged company, data relating to the employees are most important. After making the employees to work together, their actions need to be observed. This will serve as a primary data for future changes. As the employees adapt to the changes in the structure of the company, their behavior and actions need to be analyzed in order to determine the changes that are needed.

It is important to keep in mind that the organizational culture should be linked to the mission and goals of the company because any difference will lead to inefficiency and ultimately the ...