Assignment Detail

Explore the following linked resources that describe organizational culture in two different workplaces: the Gjøa offshore platform and Volkswagen (during 2006-2015).

1. The Life Onboard Gjøa:

2. Volkswagen:

• Why Volkswagen Cheated
• Volkswagen Executives Describe Authoritarian Culture Under Former CEO:
• VW and dieselgate – what really happened (1:40 to 3:36, 7:16 to 11:20, 13:40 to 16:35, 27:05 to 28:45): To turn on the Chinese closed captioning, go to the video menu bar and click on the icon to the immediate left of the volume control.

Compare and contrast the cultures at these two organizations, referring to concepts and readings from Module 3. Do not do other external internet research – rely on information, clues, and examples from the resources linked above as the basis for your answers.

Tasks:

1) What types of goods and services do the Gjøa offshore platform and Volkswagen provide to their customers?

2) What are some of the shared values and beliefs within each organization? (List four for each business)

3) Describe five artifacts from each organization that demonstrate the shared values and beliefs of the organization (one or two complete sentences per artifact description).

4) In this course, we learned that company founders/executives/top managers are ‘key cultural architects’, whose personal values and behaviours influence the overall organizational culture.

Describe how the behaviours/practices/attitudes of the CEO of Volkswagen (Martin Winterkorn) and the platform manager on the Gjøa platform influence the workplace culture. Support your response with examples.

5) Using the Competing Values Framework (CVF), what type of culture does each organization have? Applying course concepts (i.e., the CVF model) and examples from the linked resources in these instructions, explain how you arrived at your conclusions. (You may wish to use the optional ‘Quinn-and-Cameron-organizational-culture-assessment-instrument’ in the supplemental material from Module 3 to help you define the culture type in each organization.) (Response length: 350 words)