Review the “Beta Oil” case study in Chapter 31 of Organization Development (pages 622–626). In your analysis of the case, specifically assess the effectiveness of the methods used by the consultant to assess the corporate culture.
In your 3- to 4-page analysis of the case study, summarize the key features of the situation very briefly and then analyze the organizational consulting methods used to assess corporate culture and their efficacy. Ensure that you address the following questions:
1. What did the organizational consultant do right in the assessment of corporate culture? 2. What might the consultant have done differently?
3. What was the most surprising finding of the cultural assessment?
4. What are your recommendations to improve the assessment of corporate culture?
Use at least two outside sources to support your position on the effectiveness of the current methods used to recruit and hire employees.
“Beta Oil”
This case illustrates the culture-deciphering process in a project that did not initially involve the total corporate culture directly but instead required that we clarify the culture to accomplish the goals of the project.
Beta Oil restructured its internal engineering operations by combining all of engineering into a single service group. Previously, the eight hundred engineers involved had been working for various business units, refineries, and exploration and production units as members of those organizations. In the new, centralized organization, they would work as consultants to those organizations and charge for their services. The formal rules were that all engineering services would be charged for, with the fees to the various internal customers sufficient to cover the costs of running the eight-hundred-person engineering unit. The business units that would “hire” engineers to build and maintain the exploration, production, refining, and marketing activities could either use the internal central group or go outside for those services. However, the engineering services unit could only sell its services internally.
I learned all of this from the internal OD manager assigned to this central services group, whom we will call Mary. She was charged by the manager of the unit with forming a “culture committee,” whose mission was to define the so-called new culture of this unit as it evolved into its new role. It was recognized that the individual engineers faced a major change, from being members of a business unit to being freelance consultants who now had to sell themselves and their services, and who had to bill for their time according to a preset rate. Mary recognized that creating a new culture in this unit was intimately connected to the existing culture in the larger company, since both the engineers and their customers were long-time employees of Beta Oil. It was also recognized that the engineers were coming from subcultures, and one problem was to create a single culture for the new unit.
After several hours of conversation with Mary to plan how the culture committee could function effectively and what kinds of intervention might be needed, we decided that we had to do an assessment of Beta’s corporate culture. I was to be the facilitator, and she would bring together a group of fifteen or so engineers and managers from the unit. The workshop devoted four hours to a discussion along the lines described above:
1. Polling the group to get consensus on the business problem: the evolution of a new way of working and new values for the service unit in the context of the realities of the Beta culture
2. Explanation of the culture model
3. An hour or so on artifacts
4. Focusing on the espoused values
5. Exploration to identify the underlying shared tacit assumptions
6. Exploration of which of these assumptions would help or hinder the evolution of a new way of working in this unit