Question

Apply the case on facebook or Microsoft.

Regarding the notion of organizational culture, structure and styles of management from the perspectives of Handy’s (1976) and Miles & Snow (1978). These authors provided their frameworks that are different from each other’s. What you have to do:

Take an organization with which you are familiar or imaginary organization and evaluate & relate or apply Handy’s and Miles & Snow’s typologies (scientific/logical classification/steps of organizational culture, structure and styles) that they provided in their approaches or framework.

Answer 1

Handy's Model of Organisational culture and Miles & Snow models will make us understand the base for the business organisation that are run today.

Both these models are different in approach however are very significant in understandig an organisaton as a whole.

Lets discuss these Models;

1. Handy's Model:

This model says that businesses are with four set of  Organisational Culture.

a. Power Centric - Where the key people have the power to take decisions. There is possibility of partiality within the  organisation. Generally employees or other have very less room to speak or take decisions.

b. Task Centric - Here is a set of people with some specialisation formed as a team and tasks are performed.  

c. Person centric - Here more importance is given to a person than organisation. This leads to more inportance to personal growth than Organisational growth.

d. Role Centric - Here every employee is given a role and responsibility. Each employee is taking the ownership of his task and get sthe power.

2. Miles and Snow Model:

This model gives the strategic view to the business organisation;

a. Prospector - This is a kind of organisation which is front runner in innovation and research. These companies are bringing their new and innovative products and services to the market at first place.

b. Defender - These are the organisation that are sitting back and earning on their existing products. This strategy is basically used in matured markets.

c. Analyser - These are generally large corporations who sees the innovation done by other companies and upgrade the same with new features and demand and capture the market.

d. Reactor - These are the organisation that react according to situations in the market. As these are not early adoptor they lag behind.

So lets take an example of Microsoft to understand above models. It was started in 1975, at that time it was an innovator. It was the first company to make an operating system for personal computers. At that time nobody had thought that we would use computers for all our work. This gives and example of Prospector strategy.

If we see the names that we know from Microsoft are Bill Gates and Steve Balmer.

Since Ballmer was not a technocrat but was very good at product strategies, he was the key person for the growth strategy and thus this give us an example of Roles Centric organisation. His strategies made Microsoft win the world.

Microsoft was never power centric hence it is still one of the best technology companies.

It had a Analyser strategy when it launched its Cloud Services Azure. It saw how cloud market will grow and what are the entry barriers for the same. It analysed the market potential and then launched Azure.

However Microsoft played defender and lost to some of the companies. Take the case of Mobile operating System markets. It was very rigid to its operating system strategy and hence lost a big market share of mobile UI space to Android by Google.

So in short , the above strategies and culture can exist in one company and keep on changing over a period of time depending on the external and internal factors affecting the organisation.