Organization Metaphor Management Case Study Research

Organizational Metaphor
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Organizational Metaphor
Huawei as a Culture
Organizational culture is an important aspect of Huawei. Out of the 91 Chinese companies listed on the Fortune Global 500 list, Huawei is the only Chinese organization that earns more revenues abroad than in China (Cremer & Tao, 2015). Its overseas markets are much greater than that of its home country. An important aspect of its success is the culture. Organizational culture is defined as how companies conduct their activities (Watkins, 2013). Culture is an observable and consistent pattern of behavior in a company. The culture of an organization is a great determinant of how the company will perform. Huawei serves as a perfect example of how an organization acts as a culture as well as corporate culture.
Huawei describes itself as having a ‘wolf culture’ (Huawei, 2018). This describes a set of attitudes, beliefs, and values that are shared by the company’s employees. Wolves are team players. They do not act alone, but rather depend on the strength of the pack. The atmosphere of team cooperation at Huawei is overwhelming as employees are encouraged to share and develop personal opinions with one another. The company emphasizes cooperative values and identity that are rooted in agriculture instead of competition. Staff members do not criticize their teammates and try to outperform them, but instead work collaboratively to achieve a common goal. Wolves are also resistant to conditions. Huawei displays this quality by showing fearlessness in taking risks and making crucial decisions for the progress of the company. The venture into the Chinese domestic telecommunications market serves as a good example of how fearless the company is. Huawei ventured into telecommunications in the mid-1990s, when the industry had already been dominated by big organizations, giving it a weaker position in China. The company decided to explore foreign markets such as the USA that were much more competitive and risky as a means of expanding its growth. The company had to compete with multinationals like CISCO and T-Mobile but eventually managed to create the fastest and most innovative equipment in the telecom industry to gain a competitive edge over these firms (IBS, 2016). Moreover, wolves are bloodthirsty — the company’s staff pay close attention to any new information that emerges in the market and quickly respond to get the upper hand.
Huawei has built a corporate culture that is centered on its customers and one that is similar to its subcultures. Founder, Ren Zhengfei established this culture by encouraging employees to focus their attention on the customer rather than on the bosses (Cremer, 2018). The company’s directors are the main decision-makers regarding company strategy and management. Their duties circulate the supervision of internal and external compliance and supervising the behaviors of undertaking the roles of directors. Huawei’s structure focuses on three aspects, the customer, product, and the area. These three latitudes have been shared among their respective subsidiaries across the globe. Part of their culture involves building a closer relationship with clients to realize the organization's sustainable growth. By sharing this perspective with their employees, the company can build one common objective and culture that reflects upon their overall goal.
Huawei’s customer-focused attitude has also enabled the company to tackle issues of subcultural divisions. Since the company considers customers as its biggest asset, it combines this notion with cross-cultural sensitivity. By doing so, the company does not just focus on procedures and products that fit the Chinese market, but rather, those that meet global standards. The company’s employees are trained and prepared using high standards such as customs, regulations, etiquette, language, and health. For Huawei, going global means ensuring that the management and employees have a global mindset.
Huawei as a Psychic Prison
The metaphor of a psychic prison joins two ideas. The first is that people build and sustain organizations using conscious and unconscious processes, and the second is that once the company is dependent on these processes, individuals are imprisoned by the actions and thoughts that gave rise to the company (Morgan, 2006). In other words, companies might be a product of individual opinions, but their existence leads them to establish a certain amount of control over the creators.
The metaphor is not entirely clear when looked at in Huawei’s perspective. Similar to Taylor, the company displays how unconscious concerns can affect a company. The company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei based his philosophy on the notion of the customer first. To maintain this customer first attitude, the company needed to change its structure and culture. As earlier discussed, Huawei joined the telecommunications industry late when other companies had already established themselves. To succeed, Huawei had to have a strong focus on firm determination. This meant venturing into foreign markets with a positive attitude and focus. However, international markets are distinct from the Chinese market, and since the company’s philosophy is to put customers first, then it needed to change its products and structures as well as service delivery to fit the foreign markets. In other words, Huawei was required to change from within rather than trying to convince their customers to like their products. The need to maintain their philosophy and stay competitive has also encouraged the organization to develop a workforce that is equipped with the skills and knowledge on how to survive in a global work environment. Their dedication to their customers is also showcased in their leading innovations. Without a doubt, Ren Zhengfei has managed to display how focus and a strong sense of determination can help a company rise to be a global giant. However, the company is too dedicated to serving its customers that it is enslaved to this notion. Because of this, the company cannot shift their focus on any other strategy that does not align with their philosophy since they believe that the attitude is what has made them successful. Their innovations, processes, and structure are all customer-centric, making them a slave to their philosophy.
Group Think
On the other hand, the notion that organizations tend to be trapped in their favored ways of thinking does not apply to Huawei. Although Huawei might be tangled in the webs of its philosophy, its success has not led it to struggle for survival. Huawei has managed to display the complete opposite. When starting, Huawei operated using the model of a reverse engineering foreign technological company in the Chinese market. In 2003, the company gained global recognition with the introduction of the phone handset. In 2011, Huawei released its cloud services and the world’s first smartphone that was cloud-enabled. By 2015, Huawei launched the Nexus 6P in collaboration with Google (Bai & Li, 2016). Currently, the company is considered to be the largest technology company worldwide and boasts over 180, 000 employees (Huawei, 2018). The achievement of these milestones has not been made possible by the efforts and ideas of Ren Zhengfei together with a few company leaders alone, but rather by the efforts and creativity of the employees. The company depends on its large workforce to generate ideas and produce solutions to solve company problems. The founder of the company owns less than two percent of the company shares, whereas the rest are distributed among its employees, this makes it an employee company. By shifting the ownership to employees, the company gives room for a community atmosphere where ideas are shared, and employees detect and share any possible threats and any creative ideas that might help the company. The concept of an employee company reduces the probability of groupthink since the managers are also only a part of the system to share and build on ideas rather than dictate the terms. Since the employees own majority shares, it makes it difficult for leaders to force specific systems and cultures, instead, the managers are supposed to implement and ensure that the ideas proposed by employees are seen through to completion.
Moreover, Huawei is actively at the forefront of unleashing new technologies and coming up with strategies for dominating the market. This contradicts the notion of groupthink where organizations are carried along by group perceptions and illusions. Instead of doing what other companies are doing, Huawei has managed to break free from the physic prisons. Recently, the company redeveloped its B2B strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors. It plans to achieve this by leveraging cloud platforms and network capabilities, building innovative services, and migrating the existing communication capabilities to the cloud (IBS, 2016). Such strategic moves bring the company closer to meeting the demands of future digital transformation. Huawei is not tied down by its environment and competitors, and neither is it characterized by the idea of groupthink.
Huawei as a Flux and Transformation
To view an organization as a flux and transformation mean that the firm is in a constant state of change. The metaphor applies to Huawei in some ways.
Autopoiesis
Change is considered to originate from the environment. Companies are supposed to be open systems that continually interact with its transformational input, output, and context to be able to generate conditions that are necessary for its survival. However, systems can be considered to be closed according to Maturana and Varela, meaning that they only refer to themselves (Morgan, 2006). Under the idea of autopoiesis, systems can self-renew and self-create using three distinct principles of self-reference, circularity, and autonomy. Currently, Huawei can be considered to employ such kind of reasoning as well, but when starting, Huawei’s system profoundly contradicted the closed loop system. If Huawei were to adopt such a closed loop system in the beginning, it would not have been able to become the top provider of telecommunic...