Critical Evaluation of Organisational Learning With Respect to HP Research Labs

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The usage and application of the term organisational learning are still associated with considerable confusion due to the reason that organisational learning possess the problem of trying to unify different theoretical approaches, while at the same time valuing the diversity that has evolved since its inception. (Buchel, 2001, p. 81) Thats why HP research labs initiated with theoretical literature, the concepts of organisational learning in the context of knowledge management and culture.

Before switching over to the change process, HP was unable to identify its flaws as a barrier to making itself among one of the leading technology centres. By the change process HP is able to point out its flaws in the light of literature, various barriers like communication barrier, cultural barrier and the barrier of sharing knowledge among its various centres. In the light of literature, communication and cultural barrier was the most significant hurdle in making progress due to which knowledge management/ sharing was slower and somewhat isolated in its centres.

As HP has its research labs at UK, USA and Japan so HP confronted to problems with respect to the above mentioned barriers. The change process which HP labs initiated were a great effort towards an effective dialogue based process including a vast range of communication authorities like surveys and groupware. Even HP labs did not lag behind in conducting informal discussions to create an effective support system and so the proposed solution was that there should be a group of technical experts with solid managerial skills with good background of cross cultural communication techniques, required to keep track of the activities going on in all of the three centres, so that for a particular recurring problem in all centres, the solution worked out by one centre could be easily implemented for others, hence avoiding other centres to invent the wheel.

Fortunately, HP was confronted to smooth survey process followed with a two way dialogue, which otherwise is not as easy as Dr. Albert Michael has mentioned. Often the surveys concern the possibility of hiding and uncovering problems, which are quite sensitive or potentially damaging to a company. (Smith, 2003, p. 36) This cuts both ways, for the problem exists whether or not it is uncovered by a survey. HP was fortunate to reveal its problems by survey, therefore corrective action was initiated.

According to the Business Review vol. 5 (2006), the change process always initiate an environment of mutual growth with a new positive cultural experience, and it seems that now HP labs has prioritised the cultural factor to be the key to success. (Albert, 2006) If we discuss this cultural aspect in the light of literature we would see that why HP has considered culture as one of the key notions in growth is what Flamholtz (1995) has argued, that an organisational development is nothing but the development of an appropriate organisational culture within which management feels it can guide the organisation. (Flamholtz, 1995)

HP must not ignore that for a technology, culture alone cannot be taken as the key factor to success, rather technology and the manufacturing techniques employed is constantly changing so that, for instance, the manufacturing of televisions, telephones, and computers, which once were clearly separate products, is now clearly an overlapping set of processes sharing components, suppliers and customers. (Tansey, 2002, p. 39) Hence it proves that cultural techniques must be implemented not only to remove communication barriers and knowledge sharing but also to evaluate the changing attitudes and flavours of client. Only by considering these two mechanisms HP would be able to rule the market according to every region.

Therefore, the importance of culture cannot be underestimated but a technology building and providing company cannot afford to limit its boundaries to culture only. HP must look into knowledge management and sharing processes as an individual identity to success. In this context where HP is considering culture above all, it should consider and analyse the role of HP central labs and should consider leadership to be above all factors. The reason behind considering leadership is to see the management with the eyes to accommodate both sets of needs, even magnify them.

According to Fairholm (1994), The key to a solution is in integrating the various individual needs into a cultural unity that can address and meet both group and individual core needs. Unfortunately, past managerial systems either ignored this tension or treated it as an organisational evil. (Fairholm, 1994, p. 50) This is the main reason for why HP underwent through process change, because it identified its barriers which existed in sharing information and knowledge management.

Ruggles (1998) while discussing the main loopholes of cultural communication barriers with respect to literature highlights knowledge management to be the main solution but in condition when it is sharing and continuously circulating within the organisation. HP still lacks in such strategies where its employers are able to communicate knowledge sharing. According to McDermott (1999) the most common difficulty in changing peoples behaviour towards sharing knowledge is to change or modify their culture and habits. However I do not agree with McDermotts perception in the following sense. Peoples attitude and work habits can be changed if they work in groups in an organisation. All the management teams from top till bottom are part of these groups. Now if these groups are identified as a group composition, many workers who belong to various cultures are combined. (Moreland & Levine, 1992) This is what HP labs are supposed to do.

This combination of many cultural differences and similarities would allow many individual characteristics of the workers to not only share their abilities but also their demographic characteristics, opinions, and personality traits. In this manner the workers would be relevant to a groups tasks, as well as they would find themselves in more learning environments. Such groups performance can also be improved by altering its composition for those characteristics. Changes in the context of senior level and junior level group members would be helpful as it would be easier to share information and technicalities within group. So, HP in this manner would be able to improve its groups performance by:

Not only hiring workers with desirable characteristics but also merging them up with new or junior workers,
Provide technical training to its workers in such a manner so that they would themselves be able to circulate their own discoveries, or
Merging one group with another, internal group with externals so that changes could influence workers performance in many positive ways (Moreland, Levine, & Wingert, 1996).

It is true that such linking of groups can improve performance, but such gains are also followed by conflicts among group members. In this aspect the best feature of promoting cross cultural communication is the esteem of cultural values that are respected by other group members and thus managed teams, could be improved by helping members learn more about one another so that they could make better use of the groups human resources (Marquardt, 1996).

The change of HP labs from a traditional to a cultural oriented environment is no doubt the right move, at the right time but I would consider it as single dimensional due to the reason that on one hand the management personnel are putting effort to alleviate cultural barriers but on the other they are just sitting and watching their customers changing interests. A culture can also prevent a company from remaining competitive or adapting to a changing environment. Example is that of People Express, Inc who built its early success on an unusual and highly decentralised form of management in which every employee was an owner-manager. Employees were encouraged and even required to perform different functions, such as a pilot also working as a ticket agent. The result was the employees tended not to get bored and learned other aspects of the business. This type of happy disorganisation worked well when the company was small but it became chaos and created substantial problems for a billion-dollar-a-year company. When People were warned about their management practices being inappropriate, the company responded with the statement: This philosophy is what made us great. Were not going to change. The company president still held on to this culture up to the point that People, suffering heavy losses was forced to sell out to its arch rival (Randall, 2004, p. 108).

Within the broad framework of a discourse of change, a new and recurring theme has been the need to adopt a coherent or programmatic approach, example culture change, in the case of HP. In this context HP must set its priority towards sharing and the use of expert knowledge to implement change. Academics and professional managers provide a feel for how new programmes of change were, respectively, sold and accepted. (Mills, 2003, p. 84) According to Stanley M. Davis, corporate culture can be managed to deal with turbulent change:

During the past five years I have worked extensively with senior managers of several large companies in their efforts to understand and manage their corporate cultures. My goal was to assess whether and how the culture met the companys needs and to assist in changing it where it did not (Mills, 2003, p. 85)

Immense changes in the economic environment and a radical increase in competitive pressures have put a premium on strategy and a companys capacity to implement it&. To tap this advantage, corporations have to be able to act fast. Perhaps the single most promising catalyst&has come to be recognised as corporate culture (Mills, 2003, p. 85).

Immediate action with immediate change followed with a continuous flow that is what is required by HP and it is only possible if the senior management always determines to change according to the global requirements. It is truly said by Stankard (2002) that work in isolation is not part of an organisational system (OS). This saying goes parallel with the idea that no element of OS works alone. For example, a software organisation employs fifty programmers working in their respective territories. If the programmers do not interact with each other directly or indirectly, they are not an OS, because knowledge and solutions are not sharing within them. They are a group of programmers, and the overall result is just the sum of the individual efforts.

Similarly, salespersons however, once high- and low-volume sales producers form into teams to share knowledge, test new sales approaches and support each others selling efforts, they perform as a system with the mission of expanding the sales of the whole sales force. The act of working together makes them part of a system to pursue a mission more sales (Stankard, 2002, p. 10).

Despite making umpteen attempts of alleviating cross cultural barriers, HP still lacks in managing diversity through groups. Barsade, Ward, Turner, and Sonnenfeld (2000), prefers group diversity over individual team work and follows Georges homogeneous conceptualisation of group affect. Therefore, they consider the importance of mean level group affect, thereby considering similarities and differences in group members affect. They not only theorise the differences among group level but also analyses and examines as to how affective differences among group members influence group behaviour.

HP must consider group level effort and does not alone rely upon individual team members. For this the top management of HP has to construct a detailed theory of affective similarity-attraction that runs parallel with the cognitively based similarity-attraction theory. In doing so, HP would realise that among top management teams, the affective diversity of the team could serve as an important predictor of group processes, such as cooperation, conflict, level of CEO participativeness versus authoritarianism with the team. Kelly and Barsade (2001) while analysing the importance of group affect, provided a thorough review of the literature while highlighting a model of group affect, which includes multiple levels of analysis looking at group affect from a bottom up and top down perspective (Greenberg, 2003, p. 21).

This bottom-up approach to change allows both more consultation and the opportunity to identify recurrent concerns held by individuals. Therefore the emergent approach, accepts the benefits of clear standards for consistency while allowing for the solution of problems at a local level. Such openness allows issues of belief and concern about the present situation to emerge during the survey.

The difference here lies in the active encouragement, which facilitates frankness about suspicions, attitudes and expectancies not all of them positive. Beliefs that directors dont care are not exceptional in an organisation. Opinions about stress and workloads having increased and the belief that terms and conditions are applied inconsistently are the beginnings of an agenda change that managers will need to address. We may notice, in fairness, however, that it may not be possible to address perceived inequality to the total satisfaction of the objectors. However, at least the opinions of those involved have been sought and can be included in subsequent encounters (Randall, 2004, p. 110).

HP top management team must command and control to induce a high degree of mutual influence among its managers. It must:

Set Containers

By setting a container we mean influencing the environment that shapes the behaviour of a system. The container is an attribute of the system that separates it from its environment. Traditional containers include such things as clear goals and expectations, project schedules, budgets, work teams, physical space, or other system boundaries. If a leader maintains the existing culture and power arrangements as manifested in the traditional containers, significant changes will not occur. New containers related to new clients, new sources of funding, or new diversity in the organisation must be recognised and set. Leaders set containers in these ways:

Set few specifications

Leaders must see planning as a process of discovery, filled with ambiguity and possibilities. Rather than instructing the agents on what to do, the leader must allow the team to see what requires attention by identifying a few essential specifications. Leaders must set general requirements for the outcome, but decisions about how to proceed are left to the team managers. In this way cultural barriers would not matter, the thing that would matter would be professionalism.

Sense of urgenc

Some organisations develop structures that speed up innovation. Peters and Waterman (1982) called them skunkworks because they are generally isolated from the main business to reduce the burdens of maintaining regular business practices. Skunkworks builds small containers of time, space, membership, and project focus. Small containers mean fast self-organisation. HP can speed up innovations but to the extent that it would isolate general practices the least.

Stretch boundaries

Leaders enlarge boundaries to increase creative options by performing small experiments that encourage learning. Adding new staff and assigning new roles and responsibilities also tend to stretch system boundaries and mixing them up with old employees help creating an environment of knowledge sharing.

Shrink boundaries

The leader constrains communication when an organisation is undergoing change at a rate that cannot be accommodated. Structures, like teams, reduce individual variation, build coherence, and provide frameworks for evaluation. For example, teams channel communications and reduce the number of individual contacts with the environment. By making contracts and agreements on a departmental level, time and costs associated with individual agent activity may be reduced (Olson & Eoyang, 2001, p. 34).

Authors like Armstrong & Foley (2003) believe in a recent research literature Organisational Learning Mechanisms which states that without any of these mechanisms, learning and developing organisations like HP are unlikely to emerge. No doubt these authors are right in saying that every organisations success is hidden in understanding its cultural factors. Lorsch & Allen (1973) suggests ways to understand cultural behaviour and writes, Cross cultural communications could be improved and cooperation might be achieved to some degree if rewards and incentives are associated with the aspects that determine success or failure of divisions of the managers. Similarly such divisions rather aiming to compete each other work together productively if and only if the aims and interests of the organisation are common (Lorsch and Allen, 1973).

Albert Michael mentions in his HP lab Research paper that the recent change has been an example of Management Innovation. Now, the question arises that innovation requires change, whether intentional or otherwise, in the independent causes of innovation had the effect of altering production functions. How can HP labs ignore the consequent output and cost changes with respect to market equilibrium and market forces which immediately came into play to produce a new equilibrium state? How the technological and organisational innovations came about in the first place are simply taken as causes embodied in capital assets or in the knowledge required to manage capital and labour resources? This way of thinking led to a search for the specific variables and circumstances that would cause innovation to occur and enable managers to control it (Fonseca, 2002, p. 13).

HP still requires the need for a programmed and organised change where complex responsive processes are dependant upon human communicative interaction devoid of any cultural boundaries. Establishing research foundations for creating knowledge repositories is simply not enough to create new knowledge as knowledge is only created through experience, expertise and circulating information among work groups. Central to this perspective, then, is the notion that experience is interaction and it is patterned in narrative and propositional themes to do with being together. These conversational themes are continually reproduced as habits and variations on those habits. The dynamics are such that variations are always potentially transformed into new habits. While such interaction cannot be thought of as a system, in their communicative interaction people do design systems, which they use as tools in that communicative interaction (Fonseca, 2002, p. 73).

From a complex responsive process perspective, what we perceive as organisations are temporary stabilisations of themes, that is, habits, organising the experience of being together that emerge in the process of human interaction in local situations in the living present. In order to bring closer the innovators, HP labs needs communicative interaction within organisation but not limited to organisation, that is, repetitive patterns of human experience of being together in the living present, in which themes are continually reproduced, always with the potential for transformation. This potential would ultimately provide the possibility that small differences, variations in the reproduction of habits, will be amplified into new action with new meaning. This continual interaction between humans who are all forming intentions, choosing and acting in relation to each other as they go about their daily work together, both stabilises around coherent, repetitive patterns of communicative interaction, and at the same time these patterns are potentially transformed by those same interactions.

In a sense, systems thinking involve extracting the habitual patterns out of the process of their formation and continuous transformation and naming them as a system. This way of thinking tends to overlook the process in which the habitual patterns come to be what they are and how they are potentially undergoing emergent change in the local interactions between people in the living present. The assumption is made that it is possible for someone to step outside of their interaction and objectify the patterns of interaction. After all habits can be changed and so the whole system can be designed and controlled.

Providing opportunity for a better communicative environment does not only require dialogues, but requires transforming the quality of tacit thinking that underlies all interactions. (Isaacs, 2001) Now is the time that HP should consider and welcome transformation at every level.

References

Albert Michael, (Summer 2006), Managing Change at HP Lab: Perspectives for Innovation, Knowledge Management and Becoming learning Organisation In: Business Review, Cambridge: p. 17

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Buchel S.T Bettina, (2001) Using Communication Technology: Creating Knowledge Organisations: Palgrave: New York.

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