1. HOSPI’s sales and production departments seem to have different organizational cultures. Can you describe the different characteristics? Are there reasons beyond the personalities of the sales and production manager that these different cultures should have developed?

These two departments, production and sales, have clearly different approaches of the organization culture. On one hand, the sales department, as the consultant identified in his analysis, takes into account heavily the external environment. For adjusting properly to the external environment, it is needed to be flexible in order to adapt to this external environment, which mainly is focused in this case on the clients, and having a quick response to the possible changes …show more content…

As we can see, another advantage is that staff structures (mostly the sales reps) were very fluid, with wide ranging job descriptions. Thus, employees coped better with unstable environments, and had a high level of job satisfaction in their work. As they were very much involved in decision making and problem solving, they had motivation, innovativeness and commitment.

Nevertheless, the organic decision-making approach carried out by HOSPI had several pitfalls too, highlighting the “individualism” of every sales rep that, in most cases, sought his own interest without any mind to team-work. This flexibility and the low level of formalization caused also uncertainty and instability.

Another important problem was that often employees had no limits in their specific job role and personal responsibilities, causing confusion and, sometimes, going over other workers´ heads and doing others job. For instance, in the beginning, the job of the sales manager Marta Chiabotto was not very much useful for the company. In same way, the division into sales districts often resulted in conflicts between reps.

As nobody control the decisions of the sales reps, they could be vague, ambiguous or wrong, but for Mussaccio it did not mind. For him, it was better to learn from mistakes, and there was “no need to quarrel with employees”. But this also made that there was neither spirit of leadership, nor team-working, meanwhile communication issues sprang up (communication is