HRMM055 - Organizational Effectiveness at BMW Group: A Report

This report examines the organizational effectiveness of BMW, focusing on the impact of workgroups, teams, power, and politics on its culture. It begins with an introduction to organizational culture and its influence on performance, followed by an analysis of how workgroups and teams contribute to BMW's collaborative culture, emphasizing team building and diversity. The report then explores the impact of power and politics on the organization, discussing how leadership structure, employee unions, and decision-making processes shape the company's culture. The analysis uses relevant academic literature, conceptual models, and theories, providing a comprehensive understanding of BMW's organizational dynamics. The report highlights how BMW's team-oriented culture, recruitment strategies, and power dynamics influence employee behavior, decision-making, and overall organizational performance. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of teamwork, employee involvement, and a positive work environment for organizational success.

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Organization’s Effectiveness - BMW Company
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Introduction
Organizations just like societies and individual have their own specific culture.
Organizational culture generally refers to the shared values, beliefs and assumptions that guide
the stakeholders on the appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. The organizational culture has a
strong impact on organizational performance since it might be an asset or a liability to the
organization. Organizational culture is an effective control mechanism for managing employee
behaviors. It is worth to note that every comedy has a different employee with varied cultural
background. Thus the success of every organization depends on it selectiveness. Organization's
effectiveness is the ability of each to do the assigned task to produce the desired results with
minimal energy and expenditure. These individuals working as a team ultimately enhance the
organization's performance (Alsalamah 2017). The following paper thus aims at exploring the
impacts of groups and team, and the impact of power and politics on the organization's culture
with a focus on the BMW Company.
The impact of workgroups and teams on organizational culture
In every successful organization, there is either a workgroup and work teams. In many
occasion, the two terms are used interchangeably but meant different things. Work team refers to
members that interdependently work for a common objective while workgroup refers to two or
more members that depend on one another to accomplish their individual or team tasks. Team-
oriented culture tends to encourage collaborative and cooperation among the individual thus
leading to improved performance. In the current competitive business world, organizations have
different and diverse workgroup teams to enhance the effectiveness of the organization in the

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global market. BMW Company is not an exception. BMW is a global company thus has 134,682
employees across the world. The company recognizes diversity as the source of innovation thus
offers equal opportunity to any successful applicant as are the result of their high cross-cultural
competence (Ahmed, 2010). Cross-cultural competence refers to the ability to accommodate
varied people with different background to work as a team to achieve a specific objective. BMW
believes in team building as the core for the organizational success thus has developed a culture
that ensures that all director champion for team building through a program known as Business
Enabling Leadership Team (BELT). As indicated by Brook (2013) fostering teamwork enables a
company to create a culture that values collaboration. With the BMW teamwork, employees
have a great understanding that planning, decision making, and implementations are
cooperatively achieved. Therefore, the employee tends to engage in activists that drive the
performance of the organization. Cheese (2016) argues that team performance is tied to the
organizational culture. Through this analogy, BMW group work teams strive and incite one
another to become better employee by producing a better product through a pronounced team
spirit. BMW team spirit is achieved through the initiated BELT, that in many occasions allow its
display while the leadership takes the back seat.
Gabriel, (2015) identified different organizational cultures: collaborative organizational
culture, creative company culture, competitive company culture and controlled company culture.
Considering BMW values and culture, the organization trust relies on one another in acting
swiftly and achieving their goals. The trust is enhanced in the workgroup and team that are
constituted by different people. Therefore, it is imperative to say that BMW is based on
collaborative company culture. Walentynowicz (2014) defines that collaborative company
culture majorly relies on the teamwork consensus in making decisions to have desired results.

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The need for teamwork is significant to the BMW organizational culture, and this has
transformed its recruitments strategies, retentions to the non-profit organizational activities.
BMW currents are much focused on hiring an employee that is perceived to be a team player and
diversity embracers. Comer and Rao (2015) stated that during the recruitment process it
significant for the interwar to analyze the personality traits of the applicants. Different
personalities affect the team spirit of organizations, thus in BMW recruitment process, that HRM
and the recruitment team focus mainly on the flexibility of the applicant, level of respect to
others, listening skills, emotional stability, agreeableness, and consciousness among many
others.
Consequently, BMW human resource aims at training the hired employees to incorporate
them into the organizational culture. Through the training, the organization ensures consistency
of the culture that might be affected by different values brought in by new members. The
organizational after that conduct an appraisal of every employee to ensure that they have clear
care development. Comer and Rao (2015) indicate that organizations that allow career
development attract large support of qualified applicants and gave easy time in retaining the best
employees. Cheese (2016) denotes that human resource practices such as training and career
development as the key integral to the corporate culture that must be fully embraced by any
organization that wants to remain relevant in the Competitive market. BMW thus organize and
sponsor different activities that embrace teamwork, to enhance their employees with varied skills
on how to be a team player as well as how to manage diversity issues.
BMW company policies have also changed as a result of the work group and team. In
most case, organizational culture requires the leadership to initiate and implement desired
organizational changes; however, this strategy has been termed to be ineffective due to the high

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probability of resistance from the employee. The BMW teamwork has transformed the
organizational policies and process required in adopting and implanting changes. The company
embraces team contributions towards the decision making of major aspects. The company has
specifically changed the development team that comprises of junior employees (Rohrich, 2013).
This has significantly impacted the development of the organization since various views are
available enabling easy transition in every state.
The imperative importance of team performance has transformed the leadership structure
of many organizations. The innovation strategy of the company that funded by Karl Friedrich
Rapp as aircraft manufacturers have transformed into a worldwide car producer. The company
believes that its survival in the competitive market was based on the ability to produce a large
volume of passenger’s cars, and this was achievable through adopting a comprehensive
employee who makes a good team. Consequently, while at the CEO is at the top of the
company, the structure is subdivided into numerous sections that ensure the achievements of
every individual, team members, department and the entire organization. Currently, the
organization relies on the availability of different interdisciplinary innovation team that is
responsible for different projects that are in alignment of the organization's objectives (O'Neill &
Salas 2018). More importantly, the innovation team process allows competition among the
global inputs while being championed by the top management resulting in enormous
performance.
The impact of power and politics on organizational culture
Consequently, organizational performance and improvement are also dependent on power
and politics. Power generally refers to the force exerted to get an employee to accomplish a
particular task within the set standard, while politics is defined as set activities that are related to

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the use of influence tactic to acquire improved personal or organizational change -politics in the
organization. The organizational power and politics have a direct influence on the day to day
operations, and their influence is directly reflected in the organizational culture. Organizations
are comprised of both material and human resources that keep on interacting to facilitated the
realization of the objectives. The interaction process of both the material and the human
resources entails decision making on various aspects such as product material, design, machines
to be used and the implementation process always results into politics and power in the
organization. The correct choice depends on organizational politics while the implementation of
choice depends on power. Thus the survival of an organization is a political and power act.
Consequently, Bariff (2018) states that without power the human factor cannot be tailored
towards the desired objectives. Thus every organizational leader has to embrace power as a
motivational achievement factor.
Organizational power and politics are contributed by different factors. Among them are
the structure, personality, expertise, and opportunity. In the BMW, organizational power is
provided by the structure of leadership. Pollanen, Abdel, Elbanna, and Mahama, (2016) defines
organizational leadership structure as a typical hierarchical arrangement of authority, duties,
communicate challenge in an organization. The organizational structure is responsible for the
coordination, control, and management if different activities at different levels (Satterstrom,
2015). International organizations like BMW organizational structures are more like a pyramid,
with different layers of management reporting to higher layers. This power is commonly known
as legitimate power as it describes roles, the responsibility of different people in an organization
(Marciniak 2016). The reporting and decision making process in these structures are determined
by individual and groups that influence their political capability and power.

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BMW politics focused on promoting an employee based on the achievement and
capability of driving the interests of the company to a higher level. More importantly, politics
allow the employees to form various employee unions that are responsible for championing their
interest in the top management general meetings. Polakow (2019) indicates that organization
employee unions are responsible for negotiating bargains to see that each employee receives the
best salary, working conditions, and other basic needs. Consequently, employees union helps in
improving the organization’ culture since they enforce the required values that are instrumental
for the employee welfare as required by the employment standards. BMW power thus relies on
its top management position; president and is evenly distributed with a limit to the low
management of the structure.
The president is responsible for implementing the company's vision, mission and
strategies and heads the board of management. The board of management comprises of vice
president, treasurer, secretary and directors of various departments such as production is
responsible for different strategic plans and implementation of the projects (House, 2012). The
board of directors enacts their power through the democratic voting process to make crucial
decisions such as appointing the board chairman. The power reduces downward the structures;
thus BMW power and politics influence various activities such as information sharing, decision
making, and motivation that impact the performance of the organization. Employees are
expected to comply with the decision made by the top management and help the management in
enacting the process.
Design making always exposes different power in an organization as some managers and
directors try to exhibit the influence of absorbing their choices and preferences. BMW
collaborative culture is much influenced by the power and politics across various levels.

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Employee’s perceptions, views, and choices are always considered; this makes the BMW
employee feel valued by the top management thus ensuring good working condition. Partzsch
(2016) states that an organization with extreme power and politics results into poor decision
making process since the stakeholders take much time in deliberating on the best choice, while
each party does not relent in accepting the choice of the other. These power struggles among the
stakeholders always result in a conflict that ultimately affects the working environment.
Consequently, low employee involvement in critical decision making results in job
dissatisfaction thus negatively affect the organizational culture, since resistance, strikes
Power and politics in the organization have created a good relationship between the
management and employees. According to Geppert, Becker, and Mudambi (2016) employees,
perceptions on the management form beliefs and assumptions and are core elements of the
organizational cultures. The use of power by managers determine the management culture of an
organization, as well as the performance of the organization since a positive effect of power,
enhances performance intentions. Giapponi (2015) states that collaborative culture provides
effect networking conditions since employee interests are always taken care of and the power
exerted upon them is always sustainable.
Another power exhibited in the BMW Company is rewarding power. Rewarding power
refers to the capability to gain influence by offering financial benefits to an individual. BMW
uses the power to the motivate employee to be creative in order to receive greater benefits and as
a result, increase the organization's competitive advantage. Svensson (2015) Identifies That more
satisfied and motivate an employee is more creative than an unsatisfied employee. Consequently,

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the power of tears creates healthy competition among the team members resulting in enhanced
competitions, skills, and innovations.
BMW Company also exhibits expert power that is derived from the skills knowledge and
experience. The company constructed different employee with different skills that can initiate
creativity in the company to remain the best automobile in the competitive industry. The experts
are always collaborated in the board meetings to provide recommendations on various projects
since the success of the projects depends on their views. The expert’ decision that is always
based on the technical knowledge at times overrides the decisions made by the top management
is that they are found to be inappropriate to the company's objectives.
Power and politics affect organizational culture by having different impacts on the trust
and mistrust among the stakeholders. Fakhari (2014) states that cohesive power tends to make
employees have the wrong perception on their bosses thus losing trust on the ability to take care
of their interests. BMW organizational cultural aspects are based on trust. Each trusts one
another to help in achieving the objectives most effectively and efficiently. Both the legitimate
and rewarding power exhibited in the company has resulted in a mutual consistency of the BMW
stakeholders. BMW management always ensures that all employees provide their views on any
organizational change and project; this has been effective in reducing employee resistance.
Conclusion
Every organization has a distinctive culture that affects the behavior of the stakeholders
about the objective. Organizations culture is significantly influenced by the nature of work
groups and teams as well as ad power and politics. Workgroups and teams are constituted by the

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underlying policies and prices that begin from the recruitment, training and team building thus
forming the culture of the organization. Any employee that cannot fit such culture thus does not
qualify to be included in the task team. BMW exhibits effective team building and management
that has been greatly significant to the success of the organization. BMW team is built based on
the organizational value; trust on one another in assisting in achieving the objectives.
Organizational culture is ales mind; induced by the type of power and politics exhibited.
Different organizations have different power and policies such as coercive, expert, and legitimate
power. Power enables the decision making the process and influence the behavior of a human
and material factor in achieving the objectives. BMW company generally exhibits three different
powered to facilities in daily operations: Legitimate, Expert and rewards power.
List of References

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Ahmed, A. (2010). BMW AG; Financial Performance Analysis. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Alsalamah, F. (2017). Impact Of Organizational Culture On Employee Performance And
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Brook, P. (2013). Emotional labour and the living personality at work: Labour power, materialist
subjectivity and the dialogical self. Culture and Organization, 19(4), pp.332-352.
Cheese, P. (2016). Managing risk and building resilient organisations in a riskier world. Journal
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Comer, E. and Rao, S. (2015). Transforming Social Group Work Learning into Competencies for
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Giapponi, C. (2015). Workplace Challenges: Managing Project Teams and Flexible Work
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219.

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Walentynowicz, P. (2014). Lean Organizational Culture As An Example Of A Positive
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