Tim cook is the CEO of Apple Inc. from 2011. However, before coming to this position he was the Chief operating officer who was responsible for this organization’s international sales and operations, involving their management of supply chain, sales activities along with the service and support to their markets (Richtel & Chen, 2014). Therefore, after Jobs Tim Cooks managerial style is that of Democratic style of leadership. However, his style is unique as he maintained some practices of Jobs and along with that mixed his style of leadership. According to the employees of Apple, they find Tim cook’s style of management to be Charismatic as well as thoughtful (Hunter et al., 2012). Cook mainly focuses of their already existing products and believes in encouraging their business and their employees. Cook brought an extremely democratic change for the employees in their organization that is emphasizing on proceeding cooperation among the collection of talents Apple has. He inspired building consensus especially among the employees at the higher levels before mutually accepted decision-making.
Apple Inc. designs and constructs computer hardware since 1976. It is an American based corporation. This brand became popular after the launch of its Macintosh personal computer line that was truly loyal to their users, iTunes media application as well as iPod personal music player. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded this company and established their headquarters at Cupertino in California, United States (Purkayastha & Sharma, 2016). Overall Apple possesses 284 retail outlets across 10 different countries. Slow and steady they spread a unique status in the field of consumer electronics. Apple faced much criticism from those who never used their products as being expensive while at the same time those who used Apple become more loyal and passionate about their brand. Moreover, in 2001 Apple came up with their iPod and overnight became the ruling market leader among the music players. Their next move was to enter the phone industry, which they did in 2007 with their iPhones. However, with their so many products and services they have entered a wide range of markets with strong competitors across all industries it has expanded its business. In the personal computer markets, Apple’s biggest competitors are Dell, Acer, HP, Sony and Toshiba, followed by Alphabet Inc., Samsung and Nokia in the Smartphone industry (Hasan, 2012). The focus of Apple or their company’s Vision is Innovation, they think that great products can be made with the greatest innovations thus; they must keep on innovating the products they are bringing in the market. They want to make a noteworthy contribution to the market they step in and that is why they never jump into many projects at one time, rather they only focus in those projects which they think are important to them and they can meaningful contributions towards it.
The pillars of Apples management started with Steve Jobs who has the greatest contribution in this company. In search of perfection, Jobs controlled every feature of this business. He exerted an Autocratic leadership or management style where he gave little or no control to any of his employees, he himself too all the decisions, dictated how to work and which paths to follow (Isaacson, 2012). Moreover, work became very much structured and rigid. The employees were appointed in the organization as experts and where put into the roles where their strengths and abilities can be used. Jobs had a very effective communication skill through which he can advocate his company’s vision to their employees, shareholders and customers. At 2011 when Jobs left Apple it was Tim cook who took the organization to take it forward and started his journey as the current CEO. From the very beginning of Tim Cook, becoming the new CEO people started comparing the managerial styles of both, but it seems that employees appreciate the managerial style of Cook more than Jobs. Tim Cook is being more socially responsible where he actually improved their work culture by understanding the workers needs in the organization (Lazonick, Mazzucato & Tulum, 2013). However, due to these managerial changes by Cook the innovation strategy of Apple was persuaded because it was highly rebellious under Jobs. Cook never displays his madness over his employees and always has a gentle approach, he has an appearance of being calm and composed but in actual he is worried about almost everything in the organization. Cook also modified the marketing and cost cutting strategies of Apple because of his previous experiences in IBM. According to Cook customers should be provided with simple solutions to complex issues and to this happen, he organized campaigns to grand marketing, colossal engineering feats and methods for cost savings.
Apple’s corporate culture has been the important factor for the success of the organization. Corporate cultures are the determinant, which defines the capabilities in assisting the changes, new policies and strategies. However, considering Apple their employees are found to be successfully developed and merged into the corporate culture that advances faster innovations. The culture in general contributes to the strengths of the business along with the limits and challenges to the organization. Therefore, slowly Apple is fine-tuning their corporate culture so that they can appropriately match the dynamic of their business surroundings (Flamholtz & Randle, 2012). However, the corporate culture issues that Apple stresses on secrecy and moderate degree of combativeness that rather bring big challenges to their culture. Apple is already named as imbibed with a corporate culture of secrecy, which is an integral part of the organizational strategy so that they can minimize the thievery of Organization’s information or their intellectual property. Moreover, this type of secrecy in the organization actually restricts the rapport among the employees. Along with secrecy, another issue is moderate combativeness found in the corporate culture until today. Moderate combativeness is actually connected with the combative approach by Jobs. He uses to challenge the employees casually just to check if they are at all worthy to work in Apple. The major problem that moderate combativeness creates it make the employee’s moral is decreased (Eccles, Ioannou & Serafeim, 2012). Therefore, there are major chances of improvements so that Apple’s capabilities of human resources can be improved. Many employees left Apple Company because they were unable to adjust with the dysfunctional organizational culture and this is because Apple failed to show any kind of feeling towards their employees rather than making them strictly follows their job. The existence of dysfunctional corporate culture in Apple is mainly because here only the top most executive has the greatest power to execute (Coleman, 2013).
Apart from the above discussed corporate cultural issues Apple being the world’s most praised company has some ethical issues as well which can have far-reaching effects on the future success of the organization. The very first ethical issue is with its product quality. The brand name solely depends on the quality of the products so any fault can guide the company to serious problems (Baase & Sen, 2013). However, because there is huge competition Apple seem to launch a product without the detection of errors which has been seen when they launched iphone 4. The customers have issues about reception problems. Thus, product quality is one of the ethical issues faced by them. The next ethical challenge by Apple is confidentiality, which is a major distress of Apple’s 2011 apple and Google revealing of phone functions, which were, sell to collect data (Luchs et al., 2013). However, the biggest issue was that according to the government and customers this is breaching of the privacy of the users. There are many phones, which collects location information even after the customer has put off that feature. Moreover, Apple defended about these software solutions but still governments did not agree with them. Lastly, if the main ethical issues are to be listed than according to the company the important ethical issues they face are honesty, respect, confidentiality and compliance. However, the biggest among these ethical issues that Apple face with is transparency and leadership. Apple’s ethics and social responsibility and ethics mainly depends on empowering their employees, labour & human rights, health & safety and environment and accountability. However, the issue lies that they are not doing anything about local communities or for the country being such a big company. The organization has also been found to deliver educational facilities to all of their employees so that they can acquire a undergraduate degree (Jennings, 2014).
After Steve jobs there has been a thorough attention on both the employees as well as the company. It was found that corporate culture played a vital role in the success of apple. However, the main features of Apple Company’s organizational culture are as follows-
However, the biggest issue of Apple company is being secretive is because the corporate culture mainly depends on the beliefs and the values which are the basis for the behavior and it puts the attention mainly on how their business are being conducted. Consumers and buyers can get a negative vibe or messages when the corporate culture is secretive. Moreover, because of this the stakeholders are also suspicious about the various styles of behaviors that are imposed by the organizational leaders. The main disadvantage of this secretive corporate culture is the way communications are being dealt with inside the organization. On the other hand, the issues that are in the Apple organization is in their ethics, values and social responsibilities. Ethics are the righteous principles or the value that mainly control the behavior of an individual or any group. However, Apple being a huge company has high moral values but still there are certain ethical issues that are challenging to them as well. The ethical principle that Apple follows is that their employees should be morally correct and they must be honest in their day-to-day business. They also make it a point where they can eliminate those situations where employees might get into conflict of interests and their values are that if any serious conflict occurs then only they can react but calmly. They further want their partners, employees to maintain their confidentiality, highest standard of conducting the business. Apple Company’s ethical and moral issues strengthened from the time when they involved extreme diversity into their organizational culture. The violations of the ethical rules greatly affect the reputation of the company. However, the major ethical issues Apple face because of the heavy pressure on their computer department to find a cheap cost provider; this company looked for international solutions and thus, gets into ethical issues which are as follows-
However, though Apple has certain rules and regulations for their workforce as well as suppliers but still ethical problems arises when they are trading in a different country. This mainly happens because different country has different economic growth, legal systems and culture. Moreover, it has been seen that ethics at times are ignored if the organizational culture is not that powerful from top executives to down. Thus, if any organization has a organizational culture that ignore the ethical violation then that may be very much harmful for the organization.
The very first recommendation would be the ways through which Apple can tactfully handle their ethical issues. First Apple must develop a policy that should be solely based on the organization’s philosophy, mission statement and code of conduct. Apple must include their revised policies into their management performance programs so that they can make their employees answerable violating any ethical rules in their job. Then they can train their employees on workplace ethics. Role-play or experimental learning can help Apple in a huge way to engage their employees as well as their business so that they are not engaged in any kind of unethical situations. However, employees look at their business owners or the top most officials for any kind of thus, they must always lead by example. Thus, Cook of Apple must take ethics based decisions and keep a check that the same values are being maintained. To minimize further unethical behaviors the company should take responsibility to keep a check and balance through creating a system for the unethical behavior. Though Apple always hires those who have high skill and knowledge for the work that they are appointed for but along with that, they must also look for those employees whose values are ensured with that of the company’s culture. On the other hand, the organizational culture consists of the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that the staffs in an organization share and use daily in their work. Therefore, in the reign of Tim cook the corporate culture must be purpose driven so that their employees as well as their business can only move forward in terms of achieving their goals. They must also follow communication patterns that are effective so that to become more successful Apple should have a clear, courtesy and proactive pattern of communication pattern. Another very useful suggestion that Apple should incorporate as soon as possible is the culture of feedback. Feedback highly upgrades the employee’s performance thus, a feedback oriented corporate culture where the employees can give as well as receive the feedbacks in all aspects helps in creating an issue free corporate culture.
As stated in the model of Harrison’s Model of culture, this says that the power of culture in corporate sectors has both advantages as well as disadvantages. However, the moment Jobs left Apple and Tim Cook became the CEO certain issues related to corporate culture took over that are discussed in the previous section. Thus, if the same Harrison’s model is to be followed then the biggest disadvantage for Apple is its power culture relates to situations where Apple can experience drawbacks and a drop in their performance if the leader of the organization lacks the competency in leadership and business. This model further states that in such corporate culture the employees are found to get de-motivated or even afraid of telling their leader of any kind of losses. The decisions make by the leaders often are criticized among the employees who are in their lower management ranks and thus, a leader with a power culture is the biggest drawback in Apple so this organization needs a competent culture from Cook to succeed in the future. Thus, Apple can be recommended to become task culture from that of power culture. Task culture is regarded as the most appropriate organizational culture for Apple because this can provide higher level of freedom, flexibility for the workforce along with decision making in a higher speed thus, providing space for employee’s creativity and innovations. Lastly, innovativeness and creativity culture must be possessed at all cost in Apple because it is essential to understand that both creativity and innovativeness has served the core business strategy of this organization from the era of Jobs and it should be preserved for further success in the future. Despite the future business direction that the company chooses as a fresh strategy of Apple in their level management, any bargain in their level of innovativeness or creativity of Apple may have negative implications and decrease the brand loyalty and so Apple must beforehand, take certain measures and initiatives so that they can integrate principles with the corporate culture.
I want to become a manager in the future because I have an inborn leadership quality in me that I want to practically apply those characteristics in a reputed organization. The reason behind the passion of becoming a manager is mainly the responsibility and work that they are usually do. Manager in a reputed company are often encountered with work challenges that encourages me more to deal with them taking up the role of a manager in the future (Block, 2016). According to those individuals who know me well, based on their and my own analysis on myself I have concluded that to become a manager the best skills I have are in building interpersonal relationship, communication and problem solving. Managers need to work closely with people in his team by assigning them appropriate work and keeping a check if that work is done in a suitable manner. Managers also need to ensure that the employees are getting proper training and keeping the employees encouraged. However, to all these works, a manager must be approachable, diplomatic and good at communicating with them that I am. Communication skills mainly for the managers is to keep everybody informed about what is happening in the organization and contacting the clients, senior managers as well as the frontline employees (Morse, Babcock & Murthy, 2014). Lastly, the area of problem solving which I think is also one of my strengths as a manager because for me problems are like challenges and I get huge satisfaction from solving those problems instantly as they arrive. Moreover, my calm and focused nature will help me more to become an expert in this field.
Conclusion:
Thus from the above project report it can be concluded that Apple Inc. is the technology company that started its journey since 1976 holding the hands of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who are the founders of Apple. After Jobs left Apple in 2011, Tim Cook took his position and from then until now he is the new CEO of apple. However, the current issues that are found in Apple Company are mainly related to the corporate culture and their ethics, value and social responsibility. The issues that came out is mainly the secrecy, combativeness and Power culture in their organizational culture and on the other hand, the main ethical issue that has been pointed out is their excessive indulge in their customer’s privacy. Therefore, among a number of recommendations provided the important one that Cook should focus on immediately are that he should built a task culture shifting from power culture without compromising with the their creativity and innovativeness.
References:
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