Leadership Challenges: Managing Global Workforce Values in Typware

Topic 1: Managing people

Case discussion activity: In a world of pay

What conflicting values are evident in this case?

The primary conflict of values involves the contradictory approach of Typware management hierarchy involving attempts to make the transition from the local to the global market without development of any rationalisation of salaries/compensation structure commensurate to the global remuneration practices. The drive towards globalised market operations could be juxtaposed with the impropriety of operational perspectives where 85% of the staff of Typwere are concentrated at Germany without any foreign executive of the company having been placed at the headquarters of the company.

Another conflict of values could be identified as the incompatibility between the drive of Typwere towards realisation of global expansion plans through satiating the necessity to recruit international talent and that of the inflexibility and absolute absence of any evolution of the organisational expatriate workforce management policies. This could be highlighted as deficiency in according adequate integration services provided by the hiring organisation and these are crucial for expatriate employees to acclimatise to the relocated location. The base pay and benefits structure prevalent at Typware are not adequate to any extent to accommodate executives with international experiences such as that of Anne Prevost.

A third conflict of values could be comprehended involving the divergence of perspectives of executives of Typware when it came to factoring in the conditions of the market scenario with the necessity to develop a customised structure of salaries and benefits for valued and experienced expatriates such as Anne Prevost. This could be further elaborated as absence of prioritisation of the strategic necessities of Typware over that of the tactical considerations such as remuneration and compensation packages development. This misalignment of strategic priorities has contributed to the entrenchment of resentment amongst existing managerial executives and deadlock in terms of recruitment of experienced international executives (Guzak, Crandall & Alavinejad, 2017).

What advice would you give Renate Schmidt about a way forward that resolves the values conflict?

Multiplicity of solutions could be offered to Renate Schmidt. At first, she would have to reframe from the approach of hers of attempting to negotiate the pay package related details with Anne Prevost and initiate attempting to ensure successful recruitment of Anne into the leadership team. This process could effectively clarify the pay structure of Typware involving the operational leadership of the organisation. This would further require Renate to expand the horizon of the focus of her negotiations with Anne to exclude the core financials and include the holistic value of recruitment of Anne to Typware. Renate could emphasise on the value of the position offered by Typware to Anne which could involve a considerably larger and greater challenging role on the global operational stages which could further her intellectual acumen as a leader in her discipline of marketing (Brown, Minsky, Voss & Ozgen, 2017).

Next, Renate could engage with Thomas in terms of the suggestion of developing a dual package of remuneration and benefits for Anne on the basis of distinct aspects of the strategic business approaches of Typware.

The initial compensation package could highlight the strategic intentions of Typware and could be based on the conventional approach of balance sheet based calculations attempting to structure the compensation package on the living costs and pay trends prevalent at both the home and host countries of Anne. This approach could be modified to include the customised (involving variable pay for Anne to adjust the expenditure for her unique circumstances regarding elder care provisioning responsibilities) and core packages (static pay structures to meet financial expectations of Anne).

The purpose would be to persuade the CEO as well as the other leadership elements of the company under consideration to focus their attention on the overall effects of the strategy of compensation offered to Anne as well as the entailing benefits in the long term for Typware rather than considerations about continuous renegotiation of individual elements of the agreed compensation packages (Mane & Arora, 2018).

What management competencies do you believe this case highlights that are important for the 21st century leader-manager in VUCA world?

The competencies related to management which have been highlighted by the associated case study, in terms of the relevance and significance of the same for the VUCA world based leadership and management criteria, are multifarious. The initial one has been the ability to anticipate the differential issues which determine the strategic orientation of any organisation involving business functionalities such as human resource recruitment and retention. This has been markedly absent from the strategic considerations of Typware based senior executives and this has been the reason that Renate Schmidt had not factored in the considerations which were forwarded by Rainer Barth. The next one has been the competency to properly understand the emerging issues, necessary actions and consequences of such actions which could influence the methods applied by the business organisations such as Typware to maintain a global outreach in terms of business functionalities.

The third is the competency for interpretation and preparation for challenges and for addressing relevant opportunities (Baruch, Altman & Tung, 2016). His had been highlighted in terms of the inaptitude to reconcile the global business initiative and competitive leverage obtainment perspectives of human resource acquisition and retention management processes of Typware with those of the inflexibility of expenditure management policies prevalent at the company since no effective process of proper compensation package development has been forthcoming for hiring of Anne.

Topic 2: Designing Organisations

Case discussion activity: Can a strong culture be too strong?

What conflicting values are evident in this case in regard to organisation design?

The initial of the conflicting values involving the associated case study could be understood as unreasonable and unrealistic expectations on part of the management of Parivar in terms of employee benefits provisioning in the form of People Support policies and the subsequent development of extensive resentment amongst the employees as a direct response to such an intrusive policy of supposed employee support. This could be contemplated to be a situation where the envisaged beneficial culture of the organisation has been imposed on the employees in the form of overt involvement of the managers in every aspect of the employees completely (Adil , 2016).

The other conflict of value is that the management of Parivar does not have any clarified perspective of development of any strategy for purposeful and effective retention of human resources since the company management has not properly figured out the impetus behind the spiralling attrition of employees while the CEO has been steadfastly insisting upon the formalisation of the distinctive and diversified culture of Parivar through particular roles and processes.

This brings into effect the third conflict of value in between the strategic objectives of executives of Parivar and the actual conditions regarding the outcomes of People Support programme. This could be better exemplified through the apparent superficial conclusion which has been highlighted by Nisha regarding retention numbers being the primary indicator through which the apparent success of the appointed Listeners could be measured. The case study has specified the reservations of Indira in contemplating the efficacy of evaluation the human resource management policies on the singular basis of turnover rates only as the volatility of the labour markets had never been factored in while framing such policies (Alrabiah & Drew, 2018).

What advice would you give Sudhir Gupta about a way forward that resolves the values conflict?

At the onset of any such advice doled out to Sudhir Gupta, it would be required to be stated that any organisational culture would have to be completely voluntary in nature and thus, personnel could neither be forcefully subjected to it nor could they be coerced to become participant to such cultural structures which have been prevalent at Parivar. Thus, propagation of cultism has to cease as well. The next advice would be that the perceived functions of employee support developed at Parivar would require implementation procedures which could be perceived as based on fairness rather than arbitration on part of the general employees (Chión, Charles & Morales, 2019 ). Thus, the conflicting values of executives involving the implementation of top down approach regarding employee support functions and the general antagonism felt by the employees of the organisation in response to such a top down approach could be reconciled through the development of such notions that the leadership of the company does treat every person on the basis of equality and nepotism or favouritism has no place in the organisation.

The next advice would be to orient the decision formulation process to address the broader problem regarding the deficiency of strategic thinking on part of Indira, Sudhir, Vikram and various other executives. The application of gut instincts would have to be discontinued in terms of formulation of strategic decisions. Sudhir would have to be of greater prudence to provide the flexibility of decisions to Indira regarding development of practical solutions on the basis of identification of the exact rationale behind the spiralling turnover rates (Cumming, 2016).

Finally, it would be judicious for Indira to formulate her suggestions to Sudhir on the basis of four different considerations. These are the manner in which culture of Parivar could drive commercial performance of the company, the measure to which the talent marketplace could perceive the Parivar brand image, the manner in which the organisation assesses the prospective talents and the various dimensions of the core reasoning of employee turnover rates at the company.

Using the knowledge that you have gained from this topic and additional background information that you can find about organisation design, propose one or more structural forms that you believe would be suitable for Parivar.

Concerning the assessment of the associated case study, the most appropriate structural form could be proposed in the format of the Organic Structure of the business organisation under consideration. Such an organisational structure is formulated on the basis of joint specialisation of assignments where the coordination between employees is the highest, development of complex mechanisms for integration of employees within the structural architecture of Parivar, increasing decentralisation of authority in the form of delegated task leadership and through lateral communication and development of informal status of the company hierarchy on the development of perception of brilliance within the employees.

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Refrence List

Adil, M. S. (2016). Impact of change readiness on commitment to technological change, focal, and discretionary behaviors. Journal of Organizational Change Management.

Alrabiah, A., & Drew, S. (2018). Deriving organisational business process change factors using the hierarchical elicitation workshop. IJBPIM, 9(1), 1-11.

Baruch, Y., Altman, Y., & Tung, R. L. (2016). Career mobility in a global era: Advances in managing expatriation and repatriation. The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 841-889.

Brown, M., Minsky, B., Voss, R., & Ozgen, E. (2017, August). Global perspectives on top management team pay structures. In Evidence-based HRM: A Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Chión, S. J., Charles, V., & Morales, J. (2019). The impact of organisational culture, organisational structure and technological infrastructure on process improvement through knowledge sharing. Business Process Management Journal.

Cumming, G. S. (2016). Heterarchies: reconciling networks and hierarchies. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31(8), 622-632.

Guzak, J. R., Crandall, B., & Alavinejad, H. (2017). Compensation and Culture: A Configurational Fit between Pay System and Culture Types. Journal of Organizational Psychology, 17(5).

Mane, P., & Arora, C. (2018). Challenges of Expatriate Management with Special Reference to Compensation. Journal of Commerce and Management Thought, 9(3), 377-386.