What steps might be taken if one or more members of the top-management team were suspected of withholding information or pursuing a hidden personal agenda?
Discussion Questions
1. What steps might be taken if one or more members of the top-management team were suspected of withholding information or pursuing a hidden personal agenda?
2. Members of the top-management team were appointed to their positions because of their leadership and take-charge abilities yet must behave more like team players when helping to make strategic decisions. How might such a seeming disparity be handled?
3. As CEO of a company, how would you handle high turnover in your top-management team? How could you or should you influence such change?
4. Would a top-management team be better if its members had experiences with other companies before having been promoted internally? Why or why not?
5. Sometimes, a former CEO becomes a member of the top-management team by way of his com- pany having been acquired. Is adjusting to this new role easy? What problems, if any, might it present for existing team members?
CHAPTER 2Section 2.8 Organizational Values
because of their generous return policy? Is it the company’s commitment to preserving the envi- ronment that attracts you? Companies that actually hold themselves to meaningful norms and values derive significant benefits from how their customers and the world at large regard them.
What should a statement of values contain? Ideally it should summarize the culture and state how the company wants everyone to behave. For instance, Yahoo! pursues values of excellence, inno- vation, customer respect, teamwork, community, and fun. Curiously, at the end of its list of values, there is another list of 54 things it doesn’t value, including “bureaucracy, losing, good enough, arrogance, the status quo, following, formality, quick fixes, passing the buck, micro managing, 20/20 hindsight, missing the boat, playing catch-up, punching the clock, and ‘shoulda coulda woulda’” (Thompson, Strickland, & Gamble, 2004, p. 30).
The values statement should state as accurately as possible what the values are and what is meant in observing them. This is hard to do if the company wants buy-in from all the employees. The lan- guage should be concise and clear. Typically the key values are fewer than 10 in number; a longer list would fail to get people’s atten- tion and would intimidate rather than motivate them to model the behaviors. More importantly, everyone from the CEO on down should model the behaviors and attitudes set forth. People should not only be accountable to the company but also to themselves. This means that the company
should be extremely careful in hiring people. Fortunately, companies do exist that “do well by doing good.”
Associated Press/Reed Saxon
Amgen’s list of corporate values includes being science-based and intensely competitive, while ensuring quality, encouraging patient creation, team spirit, and trust and respect for each other.
Commonly Held Corporate Values The following are commonly held company values:
• Accountability • Celebrating company and personal achievements • Citizenship • Community • Compassion • Continual improvement • Continual learning • Creating shareholder value • Credibility • Customer service • Doing the “right” thing