Organisational Behaviour

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Table of Contents

Story 1: The Start-up        2

Story 2: Building a Better Working World        3

Story 3: The Customer-centric Approach        4

Story 4: Impact of Behavior        5

Story 5: Yoga and Family Involvement        6

Story 6: The Changing Culture (Story chosen for analysis)        7

Analysis of Organizational Culture in Story 6        8

Rationale for choosing story 6 for conducting extensive analysis        

What is culture?        

Shortcomings of the old culture        

The new culture        

Benefits of the new culture        

A parallel cultural transition that failed        

Scope Limitations        13

T

his is the story of how the organizational culture of the company I was an intern in for 6 months changed over time. When I first joined, along with two other interns from the same college as me, we were welcomed into an almost startup-like organization. The company was one which had started in 2012, and had around 50 employees. There was one old gang of colleagues who had been with the company since its early days. Then there were a lot of people who had joined just recently, when the company began expanding in India. However, everyone more or less considered themselves equal, and the concept of rank never came into the picture. Anybody could talk to anybody, and everybody worked with everybody else (there was not much task differentiation). All of this, along with a very low average age of employees contributed to a college campus kind of atmosphere. I spent 6 months in the organization, learning whatever I did through constant interaction with the other analysts and learning through experience and with time. At the end of 6 months, I moved on to join IIM Calcutta while the other 2 interns who were with me stayed on after being given a PPO.

Recently, when I went back to the company to meet some of the old folks, these 2 friends of mine were complaining about how much the company has changed. With the start of the June-September quarter, the company hired aggressively and expanded its workforce considerably. The people who were interns a few months back now had interns working under them. On the whole, there was a lot of differentiation of tasks, and the functional ambit of each department had gotten more centralised. These 2 friends, who used to spend a lot of time together in the office earlier now hardly got to talk to each other. While there earlier used to be company-wide parties on a regular basis (something which was already on the decline when I was a part of the company), there were now just department-wide parties. The UK Analysis team would have its own clique, and the Tech team would have its own inside jokes and what not. Moreover, it was now harder to approach anybody within the organization to talk or learn about any particular work related thing. A proper hierarchy was beginning to fall into place, and not everybody was happy about it. While the people who were a part of the organization from the early days had built extensive personal relationships with their workmates, there was now reduced scope for that in such a large, more mechanistic organizational structure. As I left the restaurant where I was having this conversation with my 2 friends over dinner, I realised that this was a real-life example unfolding before my eyes. A real-life example of how becoming larger necessitates changes in organizational structure in a mechanistic direction.