Organizational Change and Effectiveness: Uber Case Study Analysis

This report presents a case study on Uber, examining the impact of change management on organizational effectiveness. The analysis focuses on problems identified by a former Uber employee, including sexual harassment and gender discrimination. The report suggests using John Kotter's eight-step model to address these issues, aiming to improve the company's ethical values and competitive advantage. The report provides a background on Uber, its growth, and culture, and reviews the employee's blog to identify key problems. The strategic solution involves implementing Kotter's model to create a sense of urgency, build a strategic coalition, form a strategic vision, enlist voluntary employees, enable actions, generate short-term wins, sustain progress, and institute lasting changes. The goal is to help Uber overcome its challenges and maintain its competitive edge in the market, ensuring a more ethical and effective organizational structure.

Change Management leads to Organizational Effectiveness
With special reference to a case study of Uber
Student Details
7/23/2019

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND EFFECTIVENESS
Executive Summary
This report all about brings change in the organization in such a way that it can bring
effectiveness as well as efficiency in the operations of the company. The report discussed a case
of Uber Company, which affected the image of the company a lot. The report discussed
problems identified by an ex-employee of the Uber company in her blog. As per her blog, she
faced sexual harassment as well as discrimination in Uber Company as well as never get
satisfactory disciplinary action in against of it regarding the involved managers or collogues.
This report also discussed the problems she faced and suggested an eight-step model of John
Kotter to solve those problems. This model is suggested to Uber Company in order to bring
change in their management to sustain ethical value as well as a competitive advantage in the
market.
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Contents
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................2
Background......................................................................................................................................4
About Uber...................................................................................................................................4
Uber Growth................................................................................................................................4
Uber Culture.................................................................................................................................4
Fowler’s blog review.......................................................................................................................4
Identified Problem...........................................................................................................................5
Strategic Solution.............................................................................................................................5
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ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND EFFECTIVENESS
Background
In attaining organizational effectiveness, it is important to consider the cultural change in
the organization. The change brings the effectiveness in the process of the organization. This
report is directed towards a case of Uber Company and looking forward to identifying the
problem and provides solutions for the same.
About Uber
Uber Technologies, which is commonly known as Uber is a multinational company.
Garrett Camp founds it in the USA in 2009 as UberCab. The founder of this company was a
computer programmer with some other companies in collaboration. Uber Company in ten years
has developed itself drastically. Today the company is considered among top multinational
companies to present all over. The Uber is a multinational company that deals in transportation
services. It offers various types of transportation services such as cab services, food delivery,
bicycle-sharing system, bike services, etc(Uber, 2019).
Uber Growth
The business model of Uber Company is very interesting, as it includes very less
investment. The company offers a platform to various drivers of the cab, bike, or another vehicle
to get aligned with Uber Company and offer their services to customer present around them. This
goes the same with food delivery services also. The company also offers sharing services or
renting transportation services to its customers by aligning the owners of those vehicles. In this
way, Uber is spreading its business in multiple nations as well as making profits by investing
very less amount (Uber, 2019).
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ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND EFFECTIVENESS
Uber Culture
Uber is a multinational company, which is present in many countries now. The company
is doing its business in many international boundaries and dealing with the culture of those
countries. As it is a very large company the operating structure of the company needs to be
strong enough to deal with the problems taking place domestically or internationally. In the
records of the company, the company has its ethical code of conduct as well as legal principles
defined. However, these elements of the company become vague, when one look at the blog of
Susan Fowler in her blogging website.
Fowler’s blog review
In the year 2017 on 19 February, a famous blogger wrote a blog and Engineer named
Susan Fowler on her website. The blog is all about her one-year experience in Uber Company.
She joined the company in 2015 as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). She was among top
engineers of her team with best performance awards and reorganizations. In her period of serving
Uber Company, she experienced sexual harassment as well as discrimination based on gender a
lot of time. Every time she reported the cases to the HR department with proofs, in return she
received no action at all or just the warnings from the side of the HR department as well as top
management of the company(Verschoor, 2017). She tried to complain about various situations,
but never get satisfying results even faced criticism. At last, with this reputation of the company
she left the company for good. Her blog after that bring the administration of the company to its
knees as well force them to take some cautionary measures against it(Fowler, 2017).
Identified Problem
Susan Fowler faced problems related to sexual harassment as well as discriminated based
on gender by her collogues as well as top management(Gibson, Davenport, & Fowler, 2019).
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ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND EFFECTIVENESS
From the blog she has written some main problems can be identified, which are described in the
following lines:
She gets a sexually-oriented message from her supervisor when she first joined the
company. She took a screenshot of it and complained about it to the HR department. That
manager just got warnings and light scolding not any major disciplinary action as top
management consider him among major performing employees of the company(Chee, 2018).
Many other female employees complained about him, still, he got no disciplinary action from the
HR department or top management.
Another identified problem from the case of Susan Fowler was that she and her female
collogues faced discrimination based on their gender. There were many cases about this
however; one of them was once in company jackets were ordered for each employee. the female
employees did not get their jackets as top management said there were very few in number as
compared to male employees, so the company is not getting discount for their jackets hence they
cannot be given jackets. This discriminated them based on their gender(Fowler, 2017).
In the above sentences, both problems, which were identified, needed to take care of by the
company as soon as possible as to stay competitive in this continuously emerging competitive
world.
Strategic Solution
In order to stay competitive in emerging markets of the world, it is important for the
company to adopt some measures to overcome the problem of sexual harassment as well as
sexual discrimination, which has identified and experienced by Susan Fowler (Cooney, Pernick,
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ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND EFFECTIVENESS
& Rice, 2016). These problems can be fixed or recovered by the company with the help of a
model of eight steps, which is suggested by John Kotter(Rajan & Ganesan, 2017).
Create: The Uber Company must generate a sense of urgency that it needs to take some actions
regarding prevailing problems in the company.
Build: The Uber Company needs to build a strategic plan to overcome those identified problems
in the coalition.
Form: The Uber Company needs to form a strategic vision in implementing those strategic plans
to overcome prevailing problems.
Enlist: In order to implement the plan, the Uber Company needs to have an army of voluntary
employees in its favor, which can work voluntarily for the betterment of the company.
Enable: The Uber Company must take actions after getting the required workforce to overcome
the barriers present in the way of identified problems of the company.
Generate: In order to take actions the company aims must aim at getting short terms wins rather
them directly approaching the big problem.
Sustain: Gradually the company can get too big problems by getting short wins and maintain
sustainability in the Uber Company organization.
Institute: At last Uber company must try to solve its bigger problems and try to bring ultimate
changes in its management and operations.
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Bibliography
Chee, F. M. (2018). An Uber ethical dilemma: examining the social issues at stake. Journal of
Information, Communication, and Ethics in Society, 16 (3), 261-274.
Cooney, M. A., Pernick, J., & Rice, K. (2016). Utilization of change theory to implement an
appreciative advising model. Journal of Research, Assessment, and Practice in Higher
Education, 1 (1), 8.
Fowler, S. (2017). Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber. Retrieved July 23, 2019,
from Susanfowler: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-
very-strange-year-at-uber
Gibson, C., Davenport, S., & Fowler, T. (2019). Understanding the 2017 “Me Too” Movement’s
Timing. Humanity & Society, 43 (2), 217-224.
Rajan, R., & Ganesan, D. R. (2017). A critical analysis of John P. Kotter's change management
framework. Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics and Management, 7 (7),
181-203.
Uber. (2019). Home Page. Retrieved July 23, 2019, from https://www.uber.com/in/en/about/
Verschoor, C. C. (2017). UBER culture causes big losses: harassment and mismanagement have
led to steep losses for this high-flying company. Retrieved July 23, 2019, from Gale:
Academic OneFile: https://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE
%7CA506564047&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=1524833X&
p=AONE&sw=w
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