euroservice HRM
...rs ,responsible of profit centers, were ranked according to their performance, the best being treated like a king while the next year he can be fired because of bad figures to the headquarters’ view. It generated a lot of pressure on the managers who had, if they wanted to be well appraised, to produce good results during the year. As a consequence, some of the managers rejected the bad results on their colleagues and so on to cope with this autistic consideration of results. Another issue occurred when, due to the growing size of the company, the CEO decided to create service functions which would help to work on a strategic perspective by forecasting, controlling and coordinating the activities on the global scale. Indeed, the organization had never incorporated such departments before so it took a long time and a lot of efforts for them to be effective first, and then to be accepted and recognized by profit center’s managers. More particular problem occurred when they bought Turner Company, an American affiliate, where some typical problems happened because of poor managerial practices. Mr Turner was certainly the first to point the potential problems which could result from the acquisition when it said he could not see imagine how the decision coming from European managers will be follow by the American employees because of their reluctance to accept power distance while it is more accepted in European culture. Then, the hospital sector is very different in US than it is in Europe. Indeed, the managers of the US hospitals behave like business men and play on the competitiveness among subcontracted firms in a lot of specific areas to reduce prices. So, it was far more difficult, even impossible, to achieve the objectives set up by French top management. As we said before, they were very short term oriented and were likely to put pressure were the figures has to be improved. The situation worsen between the two countries’ managers. To solve the problem a senior manager belonging to close circle of the CEO’s senior collaborators, was chosen to run the business of Turner. Jean Darmet started from Paris, which highlight how they was not considering culture differences in managerial practices. As the company was in bad shape, he decided to replace partly the executive committee and hire a “right hand man” : John Murphy”. After a year, misunderstanding between Murphy and Darmet became so big that they had a meeting to talk about the objectives. The main problem on Murphy’s side was that he had no specific objective excepted for the budgeting process, and that he was not used to work with a European style manager, more “distant and formal”. Then, he had absolutely no idea of the European practices of the company, and he should have visited some french hospitals to get a better picture of this sector in France. On the other hand, Darmet found Murphy lacking of the initiative spirit which was, in his mind, inherent to tha American culture. The fact is that the performance appraisal was very vague and that Murphy felt lost and badly treated because he did not knew on what he will be judged and what was precisely expected from him. So, as we have seen, there is a lot of problems in Euroservice management, but...