Organizational Structure and Culture Change

You are employed in a large consulting firm. A new client has engaged your firm. It is a well-established, nationwide company that for years dominated the market share in its niche industry. The company has a traditional, hierarchical, and function-based organizational structure with many levels of management and uses centralized decision making. The organization prefers to use a small number of account managers based in the headquarters as the point of contact for all customer inquiries and problem resolution. The culture is conservative, stable, and risk averse. Teamwork is considered wasteful.

The company is noticing a disturbing trend of customers switching to its competitors. These competitors are small, agile firms that emphasize rapid adoption of new technologies and fast, empowered, team-based customer service. These companies are local to their customers, while your client has a central headquarter office with four regional offices that only provide limited services.

Based on its own internal study, the client company wishes to undertake organizational structure change and organizational culture change. They seek advice on what specific changes are needed.

You have been assigned to the team working on this project with one of your firm’s senior consultants. The team has asked you to draft a presentation for internal review. Ultimately, the presentation will be delivered to the client by the project manager.

Your task is to create a presentation, with speaker notes, including the following:

• Analyze and describe the reasons why the current organizational structure makes your client vulnerable to its new competitors.
• Propose a new organizational structure. Explain how the new structure will address the problem of client retention.
• Evaluate and inform the client of the changes needed in its organizational culture to support the new organizational structure.
• Explain how teamwork might be used to support the new organizational structure and culture. Be sure to indicate which “types” of teams will be used.