Cooperation in a National Company of China: Seems Effective, yet Conflicts Lie Underneath

I work for State Grid, a national electric utility monopoly of China. The headquarters of State Grid is in Beijing, and each province has a provincial branch. The vision of the company is to build up a world-class power grid and a world-class enterprise (State Grid, 2018). To translate the vision, the company coins “ensure safer, more economical, cleaner and sustainable energy supply, promote healthier development, more harmonious society and better life” (State Grid, 2018) as the mission. The five factors including safety, economy, development, society, and life in the mission are essential for reaching a top-class standard organization. The core values consisting of integrity, commitment, innovation, and dedication reflect the faith of the company to serve the country, customers, power generation enterprises, economic and social development (State Grid, 2018).

I work in the Training Department, and my team is in charge of designing the annual training programs, teaching three major courses, regularly assessing training outcomes and performance and reporting to senior managers. In the context of Communism, the training courses in a national company have to include the spirits of working for the collective goals, yielding in conflicts, and teamwork. These spirits also shape all training courses, especially the three main courses I am teaching.

Part 1. Things the organization experiences(ed) in coordinating the practice of the corporate mission, vision and values in teams and in the organization as a whole

• The company has adopted the RACIN model (Lepsinger, 2010) in the communication policy.

The communication policy is quite effective due to the clear defined communication hierarchy and well-coordinated information-delivering roles. To be more specific, managers on each level of the communication hierarchy understand their responsibility in accurately informing the next person about the messages after being approved by the higher level. Meanwhile, the managers on the same communication level are the consultants to each other by exchanging thoughts to better under the corporate MVV. The communication hierarchy and information-delivering roles also explicitly define the groups of people who are not involved in this communication mechanism. Each delivering role is responsible for accepting and processing the information, then extracting the main useful messages and passing to the next person. The staff involved in the communication mechanism are highly cooperative for the clarified roles and responsibilities (Lepsinger, 2010), and the corporate MVV and other decisions are well accepted by the employees of all levels in the organization.

Although effective, the communication policy is defective for only one-way implementation. The company uses Questionnaires to gather the opinions of the lower levels periodically. Most of the time, the voices from the bottom cannot timely reach the higher level and often be overlooked.

• The company, being transparent to the stakeholder, intends to keep the information transparency on the same level of the management hierarchy.

The government, also the only stakeholder for the company, highly demands the transparency from the organization to help it grow (Ungerer, Ungerer, & Herholdt, 2016) and offer financial and resource support according to the corporate needs. The organization, in turn, follows the directions and cascades the requirements of the government to the staff through the communication mechanism. Further, the leaders try to make sure the staff on the same level get selectively identical information to eliminate potential competitions between different departments. This method works only for increasing short-term productivity, and the cooperative environment always experiences an unpleasant decrease until the company clarifies the messages again.

• The organization has defined a set of detailed rules to constrain and modify the professional behaviours of the entire staff.

If the organization is a machine, the staff should be the gears or parts working collectively and cooperatively to keep it functioning well. To maintain the workflow and manage the enormous employee population, leaders have created a set of rules combined with individual job descriptions and asked the managers to implement and inform the rules from the top down. Also, the organization has emphasized the “dedication” of the corporate value and cultivated ownership thinking among the staff. A high percentage of ownership thinking will form the collective sense and motivate staff to achieve better organization performance (Hams, 2012).

Part 2. Aligning interests and establishing common ground for fulfilling their envisioned practice of mission, vision and values, and creating healthy communication and productivity within corporate work environments

Offering “safer, more economical, cleaner and sustainable energy” (State Grid, 2018) needs not only the secure control of the resource supply ensured by the government but also skilled labours to maintain and timely detect the problems of all kinds of power equipment. The organization, therefore, highly values the quality of work and requires all departments to share the same overarching goal.

• The financial reward system addresses the basic needs for most of the employees.

The Human Resources department is working on establishing a reward system after reflecting on the results of the “Hearing Staff’s Voice” questionnaire. The results have shown the lower level staff commonly understood the corporate mission, vision, and value and were willing to align professional practices with the MVV. They also concerned whether the company could offer more tangible and explicit guarantee so that they could better align self-interests with the corporate interest. Lepsinger (2010) suggests leaders should “develop compatible and mutually supportive objectives in a thoughtful and explicit manner” (p. 178). So the company has tailored different measurements in the new reward system to reward individuals or teams according to their professional performances. The lower level staff are satisfied with the reward mechanism as their salaries have a great chance to increase, and the team performance has distinctively improved. The reward system, with the purpose of motivating employees (Galbraith, 2014), is a strategic move for the organization to enhance the employees’ alignment by explicitly addressing their self-interests (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014) and close the performance gap by building common ground for teams. As a result, the company has seen an increase in both productivity and corporate cohesion.

• The leaders intentionally recognize the individual or team with outstanding performance in the corporate meeting.

The recognition system “can be quite meaningful”(Galbraith, 2014, p. 51), yet is often underused. Cameron and Green (2015) point out staff are not only motivated by financial reward but also recognition. I suggested my department manager publicly praised team or staff with exceedingly well-organized work methods and high scores in trainee feedbacks a month ago. After analyzing whose self-interest lies in recognition, my manager has mentioned several trainers and their teams in the corporate meeting by acknowledging their contribution. To help workforce “consider its colleagues as team members instead of rivals” (Zeeman, 2017, para 8) within the department and build on cooperation, the manager has also advocated for team learning which is the first step to set up open dialogue and healthy communication for team members to share their real thoughts in the working environment (Zeeman, 2017)

Part 3 The impact of the conflict

Among various types of leadership style, coercive and authoritative leadership styles are the most common ones adopted by leaders here, and conflicts are relatively easy to resolve and manage (Northouse, 2013). Also, one of the outcomes of training courses is to make the employees yield in conflicts regardless of the conflict issues. The common styles of conflict (Lepsinger, 2010) in my organization are avoiding concerning conflicts among staff from different departments, accommodating regarding the conflicts within one department, and compromising referring to the conflicts between managers of different departments. These three types of conflict are not related to positive outcomes, and overusing them can lead to negative results (Lepsinger, 2010).

It seems the organization has created a highly cooperative working culture with no apparent conflicts. While working in the lower level of the organization, I have seen many conflicts. Some of them disappeared, yet some of them are still there and accumulating. For example, female workers have no chance to get promoted. We could not approve of that, while some of us have accepted this invisible “policy” after hopelessly waiting for many years. There are not only conflicts between female workers and managers, female workers and male workers, but also conflicts existing in the female group. The organization tends to ignore these kinds of conflicts, and actually, no bad result has happened all these years.

References

Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2015). Making sense of change management (4th ed.). Croydon, Great Britain: KoganPage Limited.

Lepsinger, R. (2010). Closing the execution gap: How great leaders and their companies get results. John Wiley & Sons.

Hams, B. (2012). Ownership thinking: How to end entitlement and create a culture of accountability, purpose, and profit. New York, US: McGraw-Hill Education.

Hughes, R., Beatty, K. & Dinwoodie, D. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader: Your role in your organization’s enduring success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Galbraith, J. R. (2014). Designing organizations: Strategy, structure, and process at the business unit and enterprise levels. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Northouse, P. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

State Grid. (2018). State Grid. Retrieved from http://www.sgcc.com.cn/ywlm/aboutus/value/index.shtml

Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J. (2016). Navigating strategic possibilities : Strategy formulation and execution practices to flourish. Randburg: KR Publishing.

Zeeman, A. (2017). Senge’s Five Disciplines of Learning Organizations. Retrieved from ToolsHero: https://www.toolshero.com/management/five-disciplines-learning-organizations/