Human Resource Management

Integrative Case Study 6: Culture change at Pace

1. Pace set out five values: passion, integrity, accountability, innovation, and appreciation. What would you need to know to establish whether these were espoused values or values-in-use? Are there other values-in-use that you can identify?

Indicative answers: This question may challenge students to think about, firstly whether the values are framed clearly.  That is, what does it mean to aspire to passion, integrity, accountability, innovation, and appreciation?   The students may be able to identify specific scenarios they would need to observe in order to establish whether the values are in-use.  Alternatively, they may argue that specific behaviours which would test real commitment to the values are hard to identify – the correspondence between the ‘Pace values’ and ‘Pace behaviours’ is not immediately clear.  They may also consider that people within Pace might experience value conflicts, discussing, for example, whether passion – manifested as ‘driving for results’ – and integrity might sometimes conflict with one another.  On this basis, they may argue that observation of behaviour is not necessarily a sufficient basis to identify values-in-use, and that, for instance, interviewing Pace employees would be necessary.

The discussion question goes on to ask if there are any other values-in-use which students can identify.  Students may well argue that they perceive, for example, values-in-use for profitability, growth, ‘winning’ (hence the concern with league tables), or control.  But, again, they may take the view that on the basis of the case study, this would remain guesswork, and that observation, or conversations, would be necessary to confirm this.  This illustrates how leaders in organizations may choose to espouse some of their values, and not others (as was the case with Enron in Change in Practice 6.1).

1. Can you judge whether culture change at the company was ‘apparent’, ‘revolutionary’, or ‘incremental’?

Indicative answers: Students may consider that they cannot make this judgement on the basis of a case study relying on published sources.  But, it can certainly be argued that this was not ‘revolutionary’ culture change.  Pace was still recognizably the same company doing business in the same kind of way – albeit, by 2009, on a larger scale.  Students might then argue that they trust the assertions that values and patterns of behaviour changed, so that they see the change at Pace as ‘incremental’ rather than ‘apparent’ culture change.

On the other hand students could argue that this may well have been ‘apparent’ culture change.  They may note, for example, the comments of the new chief executive (previously sales and marketing director) about engineers: ‘engineers were questioning why we did things in a certain way because they weren’t close enough to the customer to know what they wanted and why they wanted it’.  It could be argued that this is far from ‘appreciation’, and perhaps reflects a conflict between engineering and sales being driven underground rather than resolved.