Enron's Organizational Culture Essay Example
“Enron’s organizational culture” Questions for Discussion
1. Explain how Enron's culture influenced practices outcomes, include advantages and disadvantages Answer: the advantages of Enron’s culture are that they were very aggressive (saying yes to other projects) and unethical (corruption, corners cutting), in that way the company can generate a quick grow. But the disadvantages are very high; they completely lost control of the company because they gave freedom to young and inexperienced people. Another problem was the way they gave incentives to their employees was wrong, that promoted a hostile environment controlled by their “star employees” who only had personal ambition, and they didn’t care about teamwork. Also being aggressive without being smart can lead to troubles; they shouldn’t always say YES, but many times corruption and being scare of your top managers lead your entire organization to take many wrong decisions. 2. Using the Competing Values Framework, how would you describe the organizational culture at Enron? Answer: Enron organizational culture with Skilling as CEO was clearly and external oriented company hiring young inexperienced employees to work in important position of the company that required a lot of experience and discipline. Also they wanted to create a flexible environment to promote a fast moving enterprise (adapt and adjust quicker in order to compete better) I believe that Enron was trying to be a adhocracy oriented culture which they failed to reach because they didn’t align well the company’s values with their norms, that transformed their good ideas (create an aggressive business culture followed by flexibility and good performance) into ideas that destroyed Enron.
3. Describe 3 ways in which the culture was embedded at Enron. a) The aggressive emphasis on just earnings growth and individual initiative of top employees created an egocentric culture full of
1. Explain how Enron's culture influenced practices outcomes, include advantages and disadvantages Answer: the advantages of Enron’s culture are that they were very aggressive (saying yes to other projects) and unethical (corruption, corners cutting), in that way the company can generate a quick grow. But the disadvantages are very high; they completely lost control of the company because they gave freedom to young and inexperienced people. Another problem was the way they gave incentives to their employees was wrong, that promoted a hostile environment controlled by their “star employees” who only had personal ambition, and they didn’t care about teamwork. Also being aggressive without being smart can lead to troubles; they shouldn’t always say YES, but many times corruption and being scare of your top managers lead your entire organization to take many wrong decisions. 2. Using the Competing Values Framework, how would you describe the organizational culture at Enron? Answer: Enron organizational culture with Skilling as CEO was clearly and external oriented company hiring young inexperienced employees to work in important position of the company that required a lot of experience and discipline. Also they wanted to create a flexible environment to promote a fast moving enterprise (adapt and adjust quicker in order to compete better) I believe that Enron was trying to be a adhocracy oriented culture which they failed to reach because they didn’t align well the company’s values with their norms, that transformed their good ideas (create an aggressive business culture followed by flexibility and good performance) into ideas that destroyed Enron.
3. Describe 3 ways in which the culture was embedded at Enron. a) The aggressive emphasis on just earnings growth and individual initiative of top employees created an egocentric culture full of