Chairman Jack Welch of GE
often spoke passionately about a company without boundaries, but one engineer
became a little too inspired by this vision. The engineer decided that GE really
needed a Department of Creativity and Innovation that would function to solicit
suggestions from employees.
The engineer's supervisors rejected his proposal, so he went to GE's annual
board of directors' meeting and nominated himself to the board. Referring to
Jack Welch as "the naked emperor," the engineer claimed to be "a dumb lieutenant
who will be able to tell (Welch) when he is naked." He failed in his attempt
to be elected to the board.
Undaunted, the engineer went back to his office and circulated a survey, via
e-mail, asking 5400 employees to evaluate GE's employee innovation initiatives.
"I thought the guys at the top would see that this guy was pushing and pushing,
and they would let me make a real presentation to them," the engineer said.
But GE had heard enough . . . and pushed the engineer out the door for a huge
unauthorized use of e-mail.
SOURCE: T. Carvell, "Great Moments in Career Suicide," Fortune
(January 15, 1996): 40. © 1996 Time
Inc. All rights reserved.
SCIENTIFIC
FOUNDATION
Cultural Differences in Innovation Championing
Strategies
Innovation has the capacity to alter the distribution of power in organizations,
and there is often resistance to new ideas because of the uncertainty of the innovation
process. This creates the need for someone to overcome resistance to change by
using personal influence. Innovation champions, who do this, use various behaviors
to promote innovation.
The increasing globalization of innovation efforts in multinational corporations
has focused attention on the need to know more about the championing process in
other cultures. The authors of this study examined three of Hofstede's cultural
attributes, individualism/collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance,
in terms of the championing process. Specifically, they hypothesized the following:
A survey was used in the study, and 1,228 individuals from 30 countries participated.
The survey was translated into nine different languages to capture the variations
in cultures. Results supported the hypotheses. In collectivist cultures, people
prefer champions to gather support for innovation by appealing to a variety of
groups for support. The more uncertainty accepting a society is, the more people
in it prefer champions to overcome resistance by violating organizational norms
and rules. The more power distant a society is, the more people prefer champions
to garner support from those in authority.
Senior managers in multinational firms need to learn how to harness diversity.
The success rates of innovations depend on the ability of champions to gain the
support of others. Learning culturally appropriate innovation championing strategies
is important for managers as business globalizes.
SOURCE: S.
Shane, S. Venkataraman, and I. MacMillan, "Cultural Differences in Innovation
Championing Strategies," Journal of Management 21 (1995): 931-952.
ORGANIZATIONAL
REALITY
Empowerment
the Saturn Way
The Saturn
Corporation of Spring Hill, Tennessee, is a subsidiary of General
Motors that is as renowned for the way it produces cars as it is for the
cars it produces. At Saturn, all work is accomplished by work units, consisting
of about 15 team members and a work unit counselor. The counselors have some
management functions like managing daily production, managing conflicts, and
monitoring budget, quality, and safety issues. However, the work unit makes
decisions by consensus, and the counselor is more of an executor working for
the unit than a manager working for upper management.
Work units are empowered to perform about 30 functions for which all team members
are responsible. Each Saturn team will:
All Saturn members have the power to "stop the line" if they see a quality problem.
Although this is not uncommon in other plants, at Saturn, if you stop the line,
you are responsible for fixing the problem. You can't pass it off to a manager
or to another department. This means that all team members must keep in constant
contact with suppliers, engineers, customers, and end users.
Empowerment without ability doesn't work, so Saturn gives all new team members
320 hours of training their first year, and at least 92 hours of training per
year thereafter. Workers are trained in conflict management, problem solving,
and interviewing-subjects that in other companies are often reserved only for
managers. The aim of Saturn's approach is to broaden the employees' skills and
help each one maximize his or her potential.
Although making decisions by team consensus is not the fastest method, it has
paid off for Saturn. Once a decision is made, Saturn members are strongly committed
to it because they were directly involved in the process. Most important, all
Saturn employees feel that they are, to some degree, in control of the operation
of the company.
SOURCE: "Enriching
and Empowering Employees-The Saturn Way," Personnel Journal (September 1995):
32; "Saturn's Rings," Supervisory Management (August 1994): 8-9. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher from Supervisory Management. © 1994 Joseph D. O'Brien,
et al. American Management
Association, New York. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 South-Western College Publishing. All
Rights Reserved.