Case Study Analysis On Yahoo Organisational Culture
Question
Task:
1. Introduction:
- A brief note on the significance of the report
- A brief introduction to the organisation chosen for analysis
2. Case issue:
- Elaborate the issue that you would like to analyse
3. Literature Review
- Underpinning Debate based on contexts chosen from the case issue
- Informed Knowledge on contexts chosen/reading
- Referencing (citations) for literature written
4. Analysis
5. Conclusion
Conclude with your opinion based upon the analysis done
6. recommendation:
Provide feasible recommendations for the issues identified
7. Bibliography / References
- Harvard Referencing System (Check it out)
Answer
1. Introduction
1.1 Significance of the Report
The principles of Yahoo organisational culture are implemented in more effective business operation. The academic study of organisational behaviour is important to gather knowledge on different facets of it like from what perspective it should be implemented to operate the business and how the implementation and planning differ based on a particular situation of a company. This following report is a representation of the role of Yahoo organisational culture on its overall behaviour and as per Myatt (2014), any organisation should have healthy and courageous culture led by skilled management. In this process, for complete comprehension, the impact of such culture on leaders and employees and how those influences overall operations is also elaborated.
1.2 Introduction to Yahoo Inc.
Yahoo Inc., with headquarter based n California, is an international service provider for internet. Established in 1994, the company offers online utility, access to websites and information to its users. Its web-service range includes features such as search engine, directory, news branch and e-mail service.The company gave a tough competition to its biggest rival, Google, and in this process, it acquired many companies like Rocketmail and ClassicGames for mail and games features. Despite this and many other efforts, Yahoo gradually lost its competitive advantage and the report will focus on Yahoo organisational culture and leadership to be held responsible forits failure.
(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2020)
2. Case Issue of Yahoo Inc.
The culture of an organization can promote creativity and, respectively, the execution of an organization or it may also be a barrier for all of them, depending on the advanced qualities of the culture. Since Yahoo organisational cultureaffects the behaviour of members, it may inspire the workers to perceive creativity as a core company value and to feel more dedicated to it. A significant one of the main concerns is that Yahoo Inc. has not come up any crucial attempts to attain a grip on the culture for a long period. The companycurve of revenue has flattened from the past few years and the only attempt made by the company is to change 7 CEOs in the last 10 years. There is also a strong lack of leadership at the edge, due to the cultural problem at work. Yahoo's corporate culture is hierarchical, displaying the features of a role culture where changes related decisions could not be made quickly(Akanjiat., 2019). Yahoo put a huge amount of effort for the workshop and work-at-home programmes, assigning sense of identity to all individuals linked with the company for improving cultural and leadership aspects of the organisation. Even after that, it reported a huge loss in recent time. Besides, its cultural and leadership flaws are responsible for reduced inspiration among staffs, affecting overall company performance.
3. Literature Review
3.1 Conception of Organisational Behaviour
As Bakker and Demerouti (2018) stated, Organisational behaviour can be seen at three interrelated levels such as the employee, the team and the level of the organization. According to Borkowski and Meese (2020),Organisational behaviour is the study of action and operation within a group and person inside an institution that explores human behaviour in a work environment and evaluates its influence on job performance, success, interaction, motivation, leadership, etc. It defines relationships between people and organizations in terms of the whole individual, the whole community, the whole organization and the whole social structure. The main objectives of organisational behaviour are to place the employees as per the suitable position, nourishing the Yahoo organisational culture and defying the role of the leaders.
3.2 Yahoo organisational culture
According to Matkó and Takács (2017), encouraging the team managers to take a strong approach towards strengthening the Yahoo organisational culture is highlighted as a remarkable trend in the managerial discerning. If the Yahoo organisational culture does not appropriately achieve these goals, the culture will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of a company. Yahoo organisational culture is critical for organisational greatness, and cultural development and organisation are the aims of governance. Seven core characteristics to characterize an organization's culture, such as creativity and risk-taking, giving attention to detail, performance orientation, peopleorientation, orientation of competitive team and sustainability.
The model of Hofstede on Yahoo organisational culture includes six types of independent dimensions and two semi-autonomous dimensions demonstrated in the figure below:
Figure 1: Hofstede’s model
Source: (Akanjiet al, 2019)
Because Hofstede's model focuses on an on-the-job investigation, the key advantage is that the findings are unlikely to be influenced by variations in Yahoo organisational culture. The application of this model will assist the multinational companies in evaluating the conflicting cultural dimensions to acquire more knowledge based on visualisation and quantitativeness.
The major drawback of implementation of the model is that the main focus was on one organisation while creating the model and as a result, this model skews more similar results. The implementation of this particular model will evaluate the gross idea about the culture and it is not proposed to implement towards individuals (Akanjiet al, 2019).
3.2.1 What is the role of Yahoo organisational culturefor organisational behaviour?
Some companies understand the importance and invest to either improve or maintain a positive culture but many have skipped it altogether. While it is difficult to prove the effectiveness of a corporate structure statistically, employees of organizations with a good corporate culture are believed to feel a notion of belonging, loyalty and dedication to their company that is indeed crucial for success.
The strong Yahoo organisational culture provides the power to impact and motivateorganisation's leaders to act in an agreed way in the organization alongside an acceptance of the significanceof organizational values and policies from the perspective of members. Companies with strong cultures have higher investment returns, but that only happens in the short term, the relationship between cultural stability and success is negative after three years. Curiosity unites employees; creativity, information and adventure are emphasised by leaders (Groysberget al, 2018).
On the other hand, a weak company culture refers to ideals and convictions that are not expressed universally and firmly within the business entity. Institutions with a poor organizational culture invest less in individual cultures and these cultures become more unstable. Weak culture is characterized by organisations where participants are self - centred or active in decision-making and do not belong to communities or teams and the enhancement of the performance depends upon the reward system(Thokozani, 2017).
3.3 Influences of Yahoo organisational culture on Leadership Behaviour
Yahoo organisational culture influences leaders and workers decisions and behaviour thereby influencing almost all aspects of management and association.Organizational cultures were positively linked with the behaviour of leadership and employee performance, and behaviour of leadership was highly associated with work satisfaction. The operationalisation of anorganisation’s culture affects the building and improvement of leadership in an organization may include ambiguous types of organizational culture and different styles of leadership are brought into a causal association (Nik?evi?, 2016). Leaders vary in the degree to which they are involved in decision-making or in the degree to which they enable workers to engage in decision-making, and whether they accomplish organizational objectives through structured components, systems, responsibilities, processes and jobs or informal elements, relationships, impact on individuals, etc.
3.4 Influences of Yahoo organisational culture on Employee Behaviour
Organizational culture involves a set of beliefs , principles, expectations and behaviors articulated in symbols formed and accepted by employees of an organisation by their common experience, so that they can evaluate the significance and actions of their community.Yahoo organisational culture has a impact on management as well as employee thoughts and actions that influence nearly all managerial and organizational aspects. Organizational culture can affect organizational success, as a culture can create competent people and have a high degree of integrity and form in work behaviour. It is expected that a good organizational culture can empower individuals within the organization to shape attitudes and behaviours that can deliver optimal results to increase performance quality through Yahoo organisational culture (Kuswati, 2020). In case of Yahoo, as the company is facing problems regarding leadership and employee management, the proper Yahoo organisational culture can increase the overall quality of the organisationalbehaviour as the leadership and employee performance can be enhanced through the strong organisational culture. The maintenance of corporate culture is way more important to prevent diversification and to maintain competitiveness. There is no requirement to behave in a certain way and diversity is welcomed and appreciated in differences. The main opportunities of these positive differences are it can increase the productivity of the employees.
4. Analysis
4.1 Yahoo organisational culture
Understanding the culture of an organisational us crucial as in today’s world of competitive business, organisational culture performs a critical role in achieving the benefits from a competitive perspective, since it holds a high value for an individual’s direction and behaviour inside the organisation (Koesmono, 2014). This Yahoo organisational culture ensures it that every employee has the same goal and that is fully integrated with the broader organisation. The clear integration of attitudes, goals and deep-rooted values enable the workers of Yahoo to make attempts to accomplish their highest accomplishment and to make sure of employees have a powerful commitment towards the company. One of the prime reasons behind the comprehension of Yahoo organisational cultureis that it works like a strategic tool for the web-service provider company’s willingness to change, as well as recognising the potential gaps between actual and desired work culture. Besides, it points out the Yahoo employees feel related to its working culture.
As Yahoo is a company offering resources, organizational culture is required in a way to alter the status quo and implement cultural policies to achieve superior advantage and also to determine that operational goals and mission statements of “connecting people, to their passions, communities and the world’s knowledge” are achieved (Search Engine Journal, 2020). As a consequence of the loss of organizational governance, the company has experienced a leadership problem with consecutive CEOs. Yahoo Inc.'s corporate culture has acquired credibility which has hindered creativity and growth. If analysed using the Hofstede model, it will suggest that each of the cultural dimensions interact with each other and concentrates on balancing its means of orientation for means and goals. The company also shares a closer inclination to the mean orientation that is interrelated with its preference towards the dimension driven internally. They also stress ethics and dignity and the tendency to one aspect necessarily determines the propensity of the corporate cultures for the second dimension.
4.2 YahooCulture and Leadership Behaviour
Hofstede model, when put into the case study context of Yahoo, shows that Yahoo’s culture is driven more internally than externally. Rather than giving response quickly to transforming consumer demands and needs, the leadership personnel openlyconverse regarding the significance of embracing an ethical attitude while responding to the needs in the operating market (Myatt, 2014). A strong commitment is visible in the company culture for embracing ethics and reliability into its business plans and functions. Such an internally driven culture has empowered the leaders to utilise the ethical brand image as a tool to attain a strong advantage over the competitors.
Based on the case study, Yahoo’s corporate culture is hierarchical with tall organisational structure, which simply indicates that the leaders are authorised for decision-making and straight control the work behaviour of employees. Alongside, Yahoo leadership personnel truly understand the value of human capital and hence give priority for employee satisfaction and inspiration. Even when the employees are assigned difficult tasks, the leadership and management of the company looks after their issues and ignore pressurising them. They also mentor and guide them for accomplishing the assigned goals given to the employees, as well as motivate and train the staffs to deal with the stress and time. As per Myatt(2014), this culture among the leaders protects the employees from burning out of over-work, increase performance and improve psychological health.
4.3 YahooCulture and Employee Behaviour
If we concentrate on the mean orientation of Hofstede Model, we can observe that Yahoo ensure that the employees ought to adopt the ethical and integrate methods for the accomplishment of the assigned gaols as it contemplates the reliability as its core value. This is how the employees of the company are encouraged to solely endorse the competition in a healthy way (Albrecht et al., 2015). Whereas, focusing on goal orientation shows that the company motivates the workers to bestow their most possible effort in the accomplishment of assigned goals. The fact that sharing new ideas and taking risks is not punishable must be infused within the employees and thus, the company has successfully minimised the fear of failure from them.
Yahoo promotes a competent approach among workers, as per the case study and the cultural model adopted. No obligation to act in a certain way is necessary and diversity is fostered and acknowledged in differences. The opportunities provided by these productive differences are harvested. The culture of Yahoo demonstrates that it is necessary to maintain a competent corporate culture to continue to be competitive in a rather diverse setting. Furthermore, the web-service giant has a commitment towards an inclusive and motivating organizational culture of direct knowledge-sharing behaviours of employees and a culture with a dynamic and diversified approach (Albrecht et al., 2015). This has ensured the company a high information flow and leverages the knowledge, skills and competencies of employees from diversified backgrounds.
5. Conclusion
In this report, the role of Yahoo organisational culture in the overall organisational behaviour of the company has been critically evaluated and in the evaluation process, the reference of Hofstede model has been used to enhance the quality of the evaluation. Based on the results of the evaluation, professional analysis of these results and some vital recommendations are also provided in this report which will be beneficial in the uplifting of the nature of the organisational behaviour, for the faults of which Yahoo is facing several problems in the proper performance of the business.
6. Recommendations
The analysis of the case study of Yahoo organisational cultureevokes the key issues that even after having a brainstorming mission statement, the company lacks the strong organisational culture somewhere, which includes satisfaction among employees and most importantly, strategic and good leadership. An organisation with strong operational culture makesits position secured in the market of hyper-competitiveness (Koesmono, 2014). Hence, here are some suggestions for the company born out of the analysis that can help the web-service provider to understand what should be done to overcome these issues.
- Yahoo must effectively build alignment between its organisational structure, culture and strategies for business.
- The company should put the effort into finding the correct equilibrium for development of an effectual culture which is deeply curved and widely embraced by its diversified workforce.
- It should comprehend the multifaceted association between fundamentalexpectations, core values and evident behaviours for utilising the organisational culture as a tool to get strategic advantages.
- Leaders in Yahoo should own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for whatever their action in developing and supporting a culture desired for anticipated business flow.
- The leadership style must be evaluated and changed if needed. Generating positive results on employees and the organisations and progress in organisational culture are what make leaders move to be more transformational or transactional. The company must choose a leadership style with most potentiality.?
References
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Myatt, M., 2014. The key to success: Aligning leadership and culture. Leader to Leader, 2014(73), pp.37-42.
Nik?evi?, G., 2016. THE INFLUENCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE ON LEADERSHIP-CASE STUDY MONTENEGRO. TehnickiVjesnik/Technical Gazette, 23(1).
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