Appunti International organizational design and hrm to china - a.a. 2022/2023

International human resources management and organization to China

• Introduction to the course .................................................................................................................... 2
• Organization analysis .............................................................................................................................. 3
• Organizational design ............................................................................................................................. 6
• Organization analysis and design: basic elements ............................................................................... 14
• Organizational structures ..................................................................................................................... 19
• The strategy .......................................................................................................................................... 33
• HR policies and practices ...................................................................................................................... 45
• HR outcomes ........................................................................................................................................ 57
• Expat ...................................................................................................................................................... 58
• Cultural dimensions of HRM ................................................................................................................ 59
• Performance management system ...................................................................................................... 62
• Leadership ............................................................................................................................................. 67

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Lezione 1 – 13/09

Practices and challenges - International human resources management and organization to China

Introduction to the course

• The exam will be written, closed book, it will be based on 4 open questions and you’ve to put your personal opinion/judgement/personal experiences on the topic in the last line.
• 2 group assignments based on work done by 4/6 people. Email the teacher with name of people of the group and name of the group. Grades for the group’s assignments go from 1 to 3 points.
• Textbook is on Ca’foscarina.

We’re going to see 2 different topics that are strongly correlated.

The first one is people, so what are the relational structure and process, how to design job, how we organize of the people, how to design the organizational topics in which we are going to contribute the results. The first topic is linked to organization.

The second topic is people, so what we call the human resources management. When we look how to manage at both organization and design, and HR, human resource management, policies, and practices you need to keep in mind the double view.

The first view is the employer view, the firm, the company view that has its own strategies and objectives.

The second perspective is the personal one, so people look at the company they expect something from the company, they want to contribute to the company.

So, you look at the 2 topics design, and HR keeping these 2 different perspectives: organization element and organization/company perspective, and the second is personal/individual perspective.

Map of different topics

This is a sort of map in which you find all the topics we’re going to discuss.

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HRM

• Implication of culture on

The main question is: how can we make the HRM culture, how we need to adapt HRM with different culture.

And when you see the term culture, we’re referring to 2 different concepts.

One is the culture, while the second level of analysis of culture is the country organization of culture: the value, language, all the elements that define your organizational culture. When you see some people that show cohesion, they’re strong, they feel part of the company sometimes: there is a personal value and a company value.

These two differences are a starting point of much research that try to understand which one of the 2 cultures is stronger. The beginning of organizational analysis of culture begins with this question: is stronger the country or the company? How is your behaviour affected? It is more affected by the fact that you’re a Spanish guy or is more affected by the fact that you work in a certain company? So, one topic that we’re going to see is the HRM. When we discuss the implication of organization, we’re going to see the implication, effect of culture in leadership and how HRM can be fit or not with different cultural policies.

Integration, how we can reach a certain level of communication and integration, think about the role of the language in integration process. What we call the language dividend. Dividend is the benefits of the language. There is a sort of struggle what is language most relevant in the company, is the English or Chinese or Italian? What we call the language dividend.

The similarities. The main message is that we put more attention on differences and cultural differences and less attention on similarities, that’s the problem! When you force difference you’ve competition, when you force similarities you’ve cooperation. But if our attention is more based on differences at the end what you see is competition. Competition is not a good step towards integration, so we’re going to see similarities and differences.

• Type of international employees: more precisely we spend some time to see a very specific profile that is called expatriates. Who are they, how we manage them? This is the whole story about large companies, multinational companies, and what they’ve in terms of specific HR management system for expatriates (ex. several subsidiaries in different countries), as well as benefits, specific rewarding systems. In the last 10 years what we’ve seen is reducing the number of expatriates, and at the same time the willing to be more global and international, countries started to invest in order to make people more international.
• Level of global participation: what are the strategies and structures that company implement. This is very typical topic of organizational analysis: which are the structures? And processes? Do they fit? How we execute some of the objectives? How we face the difficulties we’ve defined? These are some of the most relevant topics.

Organization analysis

Microstructure and macrostructure

When we discuss structures there are 2 levels of analysis that you’ve in mind.

1. Macro-structure is what we see in the organizational chart of the company. Organizational chart is the formalization of the macro-structure. We may have macro-structure that is divisional, matrix, hybrid forms, functional structure. There are different types of macro-structure and the design of this formalization of the design is what we call organizational chart.

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The second level is used to refer to at least 3 difference concepts.

2. Microstructure

• The first one is job. What is job? We have to make analysis of job, what we call job analysis. The job is set of tasks that has been assigned to you. So, if we put together all the tasks, all the different assignments we have, all the different objectives that we need to achieve, what people expect in terms of tasks… this defines your job. When defining task, you define the activities, even though the latter has not to be confused as an objective!
• The second element to take into consideration is where you’re in the organization, the position. Going back to organizational chart, this is defined by different boxes from the CEO to the lower level of organization, name of the boss CEO or COF, plan managers or delivery manager or something like that. So, the job is what I need to execute/tasks, the position is where I am.
• The last concept is roles. The roles are defined as the set of expectations, behavioural expectations coming from other people. My role is the sum of behavioural expectations coming from other people. From the definition there are some elements that are quite hierarchal. First of all, who are the others? The others are all the people with we’ve interactions with, the others are students, colleagues, family, friends, suppliers, customers and so on. All the people that we need to interact in order to do our job and cover the position are called ‘the others’. The others wait for some specific behaviours. The set of expectations based on behaviour define the roles. The roles are one of the main elements that make some differences on a cultural base. When getting into a different context, you need to know what the habits are tradition. If we know the roles, we can adapt the situation, the habits. However, there is also a bad side of this: not everyone can understand clearly the differences in the roles.

People might be vertical: when entering in a room the first thing catch is who is the boss strongà feeling of power. VS. horizontal people: don’t like hierarchy, they want to interact, they’ve the idea of a flatter organization.

When we talk about microstructures, we need to keep all the 3 concepts together, because if there is no alignment or coherence between the 3 concepts, the performance of workers will not be very good: a misalignment between the job, content of the job, the position that they have and the role. There is no coherence. Workers will probably be more motivated, satisfied, and cooperative if there is a coherence between the 3.

For what concern macrostructure, we’re going to look at different types of macrostructures like functional, divisional, matrix and hybrid forms. They’re name of different types of organizational forms. So, we need to design them. What you’ve to keep in mind is that depending on organizational structures people show different behaviours, so when you change the structures (for example moving from a functional to divisional one) there is a demand for changing the behaviour of the people. People don’t want to go out their own comfort zone, they want to have their own things, all of us. Our actions are defined by routine in most case.

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Comfort doesn’t allow to see or foresee the changes. So, in many cases when you change the microstructure you need also to change your behaviours.

Organization meaning

Organization doesn’t say anything about actions. So, change and transform the word in organizing.

Organizing has a very precise function: must help, support, guide, lead people to express/show an expected/requested behaviours. It’s something that we can call a set of roles. It is mechanism to support, guide the people learning. But learning what? An expected behaviour. If you’re not able to have an expected behaviour, you won’t be able to organize your company. So, the main issue that we’ve in front of us when we start managing situation is that we need to have a quite clear picture of expected behaviours: if you’re not able to describe the behaviour expected, it’s almost impossible to design your organization. We need to have a behavioural approach to organizational design. The organization is not defining just roles but help the people to express a specific behaviour, which is not a set of people intentions, it is something you can see clearly, you can observe.

Organizational mindset

Organizational mindset à

• The main question in organization analysis and in HR is why, it’s not when or what organizational approach. So, when you look at companies at the organizational point of view first question is why?
• The second element of the organisational mindset (first one was why) is that you need always to see costs and benefits, advantages, and disadvantages. All the organization solutions show some positive and negative effects, you need to be able to see both.
• The organizational analysis requires a mindset that is very pragmatic. You need go down, you cannot adopt the so-called helicopter view. You need to go down where things are done, see clearly what the contents of the job are, see the people. You cannot just to make decision, do plans. That’s why we are going to talk about workflow analysis, the flow of different activities.

Organizational mindsets: Why + positive and negative sides + alternatives meaning we’ve several options + be open to alternatives -> positive mindset.

The problem is that the organization analysis is not based on just 1 solution but is based to discover/explore alternative and options. Be open to new solutions, find out alternatives. Otherwise, you just replicate.

We’re going to see when we discussed about organizational analysis also the concept of network because it’s a concept largely use by companies, some of the more innovative companies they try to use an organizational form that is based on this notion of networks. Networks means that we have nodes, links, it’s not hierarchical structure, a very vertical structure but based on different nodes, a set of nodes, and what is relevant is the position of nodes inside the structure that defines.

Another concept in the organizational analysis is top-down approach vs bottom-up approach.

Top-down means that the hierarchy is relevant, the vertical dimension is relevant, what people do is merely execute some works. The problem is very simple: top-down means centralization of decision making, there is one boss, and the other people do tasks, follow the procedures, the rules, the orders. The problem is that sometimes the top of the organization doesn’t have all the information needed in order to make the decision, there might be a lack of information so the decision made might be wrong. This is due to the fact that most of the times information is at the lower level of the organization, people who work with customers, see the

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problem, the market, they’ve a fresh idea of what’s going on. There is a positive and negative aspect of this. The approach is also affected by culture and the perception of hierarchy.

On the contrary, some organizations are more or flat bottom-up.

People

Then we’ve people and we use the people organizational culture as a sort of linkage between the organizational analysis and people. When we discuss about the people, some of the elements that you need to consider and describe are:

• The motivation of people, what are the main factors that motivate people and for some of us it’s very clear this idea they ask themselves what are the effects and elements that make people more or less motivated.
• Perceptions.
• Personalities.
• Personal beliefs.
• Attitudes towards different values.

When we discuss about HR, we always consider 3 different types of evaluation.

• The first evaluation is job evaluation, so the analysis of the content of your job. The job evaluation gives you information about the pay, rewards, job, the content, tasks, the level of knowledge request to do something. This is part of job evaluation.
• Second element is the performance evaluation, so measuring the contribution of people in a certain job to achieve a certain objective.
• The third is the potential (attitude) evaluation: which is the orientation of the people? Strengths and weakness of people. Something that is concerned with attitude of the people. The potential is somethings that is unexpressed by the people or something that people have but maybe they don’t know exactly. When we evaluate performance, we don’t evaluate people, while when you look at the potential of people you look more carefully to the individual qualities.

Skills evaluation is the skills evaluation, so evaluating competences and skills of people. Soft skills are part of attitude. Here skills mean competences.

Organizational design

Behavioural approach

Why behavioural? Because roles depend on expected behaviours. When we change organizational context, we change the behaviour of people. Behavioural approach is quite relevant from an organizational point of view.

I. The first element is rules, quality rules. Think about rules as a set of procedures and instructions. The rules define what are the behaviours expected by the people. The problem of managers and organizational issue is that we need to be very clear on the linkages between rules and behaviour: if you change the rules what happen in the behaviour? Sometimes we don’t have enough evidence, or we don’t pay enough attention to the linkages, relationships between the rules and behaviour of people, creating a misalignment between rules and behaviour. One of the things that we need to do on a daily basis is to ask WHY there are these rules and HOW these rules AFFECT the behaviour. A part of organizational design is defining what rules are.

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Lezione 2 - 14/09

To recap

We’ve seen it’s useful to have a sort of behaviour approach to organizational design.

First message was that we need to need to pay attention what are behaviours. Each time you design an organization solution you need to go directly towards: what are the effects on the behaviour of people? Remember, behaviour is something you can observe and measure, it’s not desire of people.

Organizational design: main variables – part 1

In the behavioural approach the main variables are:

• Flow of activities and processes: interdependence and coordination.
• People: behavioral differentiation and integration.
• Control mechanism: market, organization, and clan.
• Knowledge and competences: stock of knowledge, learning and connection. Combinative capabilities.

1. The first one is roles. From an organizational point of view rules are procedures, processes, useful to define what is the behaviour expected. The problem is that sometimes we design organization without considering what are the effects on the behaviour of the people.

Example: the rewarding system represents the incentive, the money that you give to workers if they achieve the goals. Big mistake: designing the rewarding system on individual basis, so pay people differently for their own individual performance, but at the same time ask to coordinate and collaborate. It’s something that happen when the linkage between rules and behaviour is not clear enough.

HR managers need to analyse deeply this