Greiners Model

In the article titled “How Microsoft’s Growth Led to Control Problems”, we looked at the history of Microsoft and how they have grown in size and throughout this time they have been forced to adapt and overcome some of their growing pains. Greiner’s Model of Organizational Growth “proposes that an organization passes through five sequential growth stages during the course of organizational evolution and that each stage ends in a crisis due to a major problem that the organization encounters” (Jones . 315). Over the years Microsoft has worked on rewarding its teams of employees that work hard and complete the tasks assigned to them. According to the article, “In its first decade and even beyond, much of Microsoft’s reward system was based on team performance; employees of successful teams that quickly developed innovative software received valuable stock options and other benefits”. By creating incentives for their employees Microsoft gave themselves an edge by making sure that the employees were working hard as a team to create the best products possible and be as innovative as the possibly could be. This is what Greiner called “Stage 1, Growth through creativity”. You see, at this point Microsoft was still young and relatively small, so they needed their employees to make new products that the consumers had never seen before to ensure that the company could continue to be profitable and continue to expand. A problem with expansion is when an employer is dealing with more employees they often times realize that they are better at being an entrepreneur and not as good at managing. In Greiner’s model this is called the “Crisis of Leadership”. In the case of Microsoft they used their best team members and they “received rewards such as promotion to become managers or new leaders as the company grew”.

The second Stage of Greiner’s Model is “Growth through Direction. This is where the “top management team takes responsibility for directing the company’s strategy, and lower level managers assume key functional responsibilities” (Jones p. 315). Microsoft’s newer managers had changed the evaluation system and in 2006 their change in evaluations caused their new “Vista” program to come out six months later than originally projected. The Leaders at Microsoft were trying to “Adopt a system to try to increase