Treating the organizational setting and its leadership challenges as a unidimensional system based on differing levels of hierarchical or functional responsibility does not reflect the divergence of leadership behaviors that exist or the skills needed to demonstrate potential for new environments. Cycle time, life stage, and cultural conditions warrant examining not only hierarchical differences in responsibility but also the context in which leadership acts occur, their implications and outcomes. Every employee has a unique personal traits and values, so he/she should pay a special attention to culture and missions of the organization he/she is going to work for. Shin–Etsu Chemical Co is a Tokyo-based company operating in the USA. In order to work for this organization, it is important to evaluate and analyse organizational culture and performance.
Discussion Section
Organizational culture of SEC
Located in the USA, Shin–Etsu Chemical Co keeps and follows strong Japanese traditions in performance management and employee relations. SEC organizational managers at every level accept the broad concept of worker participation and many of employees’ specific suggestions for change. But manager buy-in is far from automatic. SEC managers perceive that increased employee participation in decision making threatens their power. Building on commitment theories of worker participation, SEC leaders propose that employees should be involved in any decision to augment worker participation. Gaining managers’ commitment to participation by involving them in planning for an increase in worker participation may be time consuming and difficult. In the absence of such commitment, worker participation is very likely to fail. SEC’s goal is to create an involved, participative workforce, it ought to offer not only opportunities for worker participation but also extensive training regarding task-relevant skills as well as business processes and outcomes; rewards for innovation, initiative, and group performance; and opportunities for interaction and cross-fertilization among the members of the organization’s diverse functions. When participation is well integrated into the fabric of an organization’s policies, practices, and culture, participation becomes an accepted norm (Shin–Etsu Chemical Co. Home Page 2010).
Personal Qualities
Analysis of my personal qualities and questionnaire results allow me to say that I fit SEC culture well. My p[personal approach is based on normative and cultural values held by the organization. These often result from input of organizational development specialists rather than being based on empirical research. These competencies are difficult to define in behavioral terms. They often reflect values, such as “valuing diversity rather than the implicit outcomes associated with the value itself, such as managing conflict, working across organizational boundaries, or acquiring relevant information from diverse informational sources. This approach is based on anticipated future needs and strategic business objectives rather than driven from the past. This can be highly appropriate to many business settings undergoing rapid change. Speculation about future behaviors can be minimized by going to relevant subject matter experts (such as new product developers) to anticipate the behavioral changes that are likely to occur. The behaviorally based approach seems to be most effective in identifying what is really needed in the future (Kinicki and Kreitner 76).
Evaluation of my career and life traits
I am a Japanese, so I would be easily for me and other employees to communicate and interact. In contrast to many other people, I am well aware of cultural differences between Americans and Japanese people and can avoid cross cultural conflicts and misunderstanding. Although the behaviors identified can reflect many traditionally based competencies, the focus is to mirror the strategic direction for the firm, such as expanding into radically new markets, understanding skills needed to lead different elements of a product or organizational life cycle, realigning the firm through mergers or downsizing, or entering into new organizational relationships like joint ventures. To gather this kind of data, interviews, simulations, or focus groups with key experts identify anticipated key behavioral situations. Key to this process is a highly qualified facilitator who challenges the data providers to give behavioral evidence, not just opinions. As a result, the process forces executives and other appraisers to examine the criteria they use and provide concrete on-the-job behavioral data in order to examine future implications.
I value the SEC approach in decision making and can meet its current needs in accounting particle. SEC’s planning techniques have evolved significantly over the last decade. In its traditional context, succession planning has been thought of primarily as replacement planning. Succession planning meant having talent in reserve. In other words, it was much like the minor league system in professional baseball. An organization needed a stable of talent in case major league players were injured, lost their skills, or retired. Thus, organizations took many years to train and develop junior managers, watching carefully to cull the most talented from the pool and move them forward. Commune distance and sense of community in my work group are the most important for me. So, I am sure that the environment and goals of SEC meet my life and career expectations (Kinicki and Kreitner 99).
Specific leadership skills and behaviors are needed for teamwork, for example, in start-up organizations where leaders must build a team. Similarly, if a company is to move toward an empowered environment or a service-quality framework, a unique skill set in the senior leadership team is also required to support these interventions successfully. SEC has versatile managers and is finding fewer candidates available with the skills they need. SEC works within these new expectations and constraints and adjust the measure of fit to include not only past experience but also individual concerns and expectations. Self-guided team-based approaches are also taking hold in many organizations. Indeed, the whole notion of a management and executive hierarchy is being eroded to some degree. Large organizational systems are being replaced by a new form of flatter, flexible, interactive, less level-bound organizational architecture. Different skills and developmental experiences will be required to prepare leaders for enticing-and-persuading rather than command-and-control approaches to problem solving and decision making (Shin–Etsu Chemical Co. Home Page 2010).
The potential of advanced information systems technology is emerging, with just-in-time information systems providing on-line resources for both applicants and organizations. To employ it, better ways to audit and inventory the talent within an industry, assess organizational cultural fit, and provide access to currently proprietary or private information on both individuals and organizations are needed. Similar to the stock market, executive selection and succession processes may evolve into an open system with critical comparative information available for all participants. Still, many generally accepted practices found in U.S. businesses may not be universally applied in other cultures with different laws and customs. For example, the U.S. headquarters of an organization may decide that pay for performance and performance appraisal are useful tools as a matter of principle. But the specifics of how those principles may be applied in subsidiaries around the world is another matter. For example, the Asian approach to pay for performance may place more emphasis on group or team rewards than more individually driven U.S. methods. Likewise, appraisal, a concept based on individual performance and development, may be very difficult if not impossible to carry out in a highly socialist country where jobs are scarce and wages low. In the traditional socialist or communist systems, individual rewards and indeed the very concept of individual differences are traditionally not acceptable; one individual cannot really be that different from another and therefore cannot be rewarded differently.
The task of selecting the right leader for the right situation is often left to executive search firms, boards of directors, or other parties who do not have the tools or experience to differentiate among the varying characteristics necessary for executive success. Begin with a clear understanding and differentiation between performance, potential, and suitability. Have clearly defined and behaviorally based performance expectations. In this way, decision makers can focus on the critical skills and experiences needed in a target assignment, which in turn will enable them to focus on comparing a talent pool on the basis of key dimensions that will be essential in the leadership role to be filled. Finally, a long-term strategic process for harvesting executive-level talent will enable all parties to understand and prepare for a continuously changing and dynamic future rather than rely on static data driven from past experiences that may no longer be relevant (Kinicki and Kreitner 77).
The greater employee participation in planning change—regarding new computerized systems, new customer services, or new production strategies, for example—the more committed employees will be to the change and thus the more successful the change initiative is likely to be. Cognitive models of worker participation, as noted earlier, suggest that worker participation is most effective and indeed only appropriate if employees have the knowledge necessary to make intelligent, informed decisions about organizational problems and opportunities. Contingent workers, however, have limited information and knowledge about the organization’s goals, history, strategy, and culture to draw on in decision making. Further, when workers participate in decision making, volunteering suggestions to improve company performance, they are expressing their hopes for, trust in, and commitment to their company’s future. Downsizing and contingent employment are antithetical to the development and expression of such hopes, trust, and commitment.
Conclusion
The analysis of SEC and comparison it with my personal life and career expectations allow me to say that I would fit SEC”s culture and organizational goals. These usually include customized simulations based on an intensive competency analysis, such as the key behaviors expected in current and future leadership roles in the target organization; an external team of experienced professional assessors who have firsthand knowledge of the behaviors and style of the client’s organization; a highly interactive and integrated assessment process that enables participants to relate to each other during an interactive in-basket exercise and other exercises; professional actors who simulate many of the key interpersonal issues faced by this group; and personalized coaching, offered on a case-by-case basis, to explore “derailment” indicators or provide targeted coaching for organizational and personal career transitions.
Works Cited
Kinicki, A, Kreitner, R. Organizational Behavior: Key Concepts, skills and best practice. 3d edn. McGraw-Hill/Irwin; 3 edition, 2006.
Shin–Etsu Chemical Co. Home Page (2010).