Samsung Case Study

Another key factor in understanding problems faced by Samsung in dealing with the new generation of “digital natives” is to understand not only broad national traits mentioned before, but specifically the work ethics prevalent in Korean businesses. The case mentions that South Korea has the longest working week hours among all OECD countries. But this information appears dry until you realize specific reasons why those hours are so long. Some of the examples are:
Our recommendation in hiring an outside consulting company suggest to locate either a South Korean consulting with significant exposure to the Western business environment or the Western consulting company who does a lot of business in South Korea. In either case the company should have thorough understanding of the local traditional cultural environment, the expectations of the new generation of employees, and those of the Western employees.
Specific assignment for the consulting company would be to survey various groups of current employees and target hires. Proposed segmentation for the surveyed groups is as follows:
• Current older employees
• Current younger employees
• Group representing prospective younger employees
• Group representing prospective foreign non-Korean employees
• Group representing prospective foreign Korean employees
• Current senior management
• Current middle management
• Current knowledge workers
• Current operators
• Employees from various functional departments, such as R&D, production, corporate level
• Employees from various geographical locations, e.g. South Korea, USA, Western Europe and elsewhere where the Samsung company is present
The specific questions for these surveys should be around the workers’ expectations about fostering creativity and innovation, working conditions, company internal communications, reward systems, work-life balance.
The specific responses from each of the surveyed groups should be tabulated and given different weights.