Case Study Of Aetna's Organizational Culture

When changing a company’s organizational culture may goes well

Changes in technology, the markets, societal values, workplace dynamics and the global economy have all contributed to creating an external environment that is constantly on the move, unpredictable and often devastating for companies that are unprepared or unable to respond accordingly. Many companies today are thus forced to either change or adapt their organisational culture to keep up. (Burnes, 2004) Furthermore, with global mergers and acquisitions at a seven-year high in 2014 (Roumeliotis, 2014) and set to increase further due to companies’ desire to outdo rivals and widespread investor support for such deals, knowing how to manage changes in organisational culture has become

Employees are more familiar with their company culture’s quirks and nuances and may have valuable input on strategy and the design and implementation of new changes. John W. Rowe, Aetna’s fourth CEO in five years, made an exemplary case for this. Instead of launching into changes, Rowe took time to interact with the employees, understand their perspectives and include them in change planning. This let him identify Aetna’s biggest problem and unearth the company’s significant cultural strengths and traits. Realising that Aetna employees would resist an overhaul of organisational culture, Rowe altered his change approach revitalize Aetna’s culture, implementing few interventions, but ones that would result in small but significant behavioural changes. His approach was highly

In the case of Intuit, Steve Bennett refocused the company’s development strategy to make it more customer-driven. The focus on entering new markets and developing new products took advantage of the pre-existing entrepreneurial spirit of the company but at the same time added strategic focus, addressing the more laid-back culture of Intuit. This made the organisational culture change easier for employees to adapt to and his smart leveraging of the existing culture allowed the company to achieve double-digit revenue growth in his first year. (Groysberg, McLean & Nohria, 2006) James McNerney too enjoyed great success in 3M. 3M’s scientists were technically savvy and performance-oriented, and McNerney’s plans for process improvements sat well with them. They became more receptive towards the practices McNerney brought over from General Electric, allowing focus to shift quickly and strongly towards execution. In moulding a familiar culture to incorporate good practices of another rather than destroying that and starting from scratch, McNerney was able to make profits and stock price climb 35% in three years. (Groysberg, McLean & Nohria, 2006) These successes are consistent with the finding that human nature holds “a strong preference for stability and continuity” (Brooks & Bate, 1994). By allowing some of the original practices to continue, employees would be able to