Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior

University of Phoenix

Organizational Behavior

In today’s society, change is inevitable. An organization’s culture can either assist or hold back change. Most managers will anticipate a need for change in order to decrease the gap between the desired and actual production goals. Kudler Fine Foods has experienced significant growth and now sees the opportunity to expand the services that are offered, improve efficiency of operations and increase the number of purchases each consumer makes by increasing loyalty and profitability of each consumer. Brenda Wagner, Director of Administration and Human Resources of Kudler Fine Foods, has asked Team C to evaluate and assess the level of readiness for change the company is currently at. This paper will evaluate the company’s organizational culture and structure, the company’s leadership style and provide examples of both internal and external forces that could drive change at Kudler Fine Foods.

Kudler Fine Foods Organizational Culture

“An organization culture is a system of shared values, assumptions, beliefs, and norms that unite the members of an organization” (Gomez-Mejia& Balkin, 2002). Kudler Fine Food is an example of a company that has an organizational culture. Kathy Kudler is the founder and president of Kudler Fine Food. She had a strong passion for gourmet cooking and gourmet food. Frustrated with having to travel all over town for gourmet food, Kathy decided to open a gourmet restaurant and shop. Her dream became a reality when she opened her first store in 1998. One aspect of the Kudler Fine Food culture is to be committed to providing customers with the finest selections of food and wine. The Kudler Fine Food philosophy is to satisfy employees, which creates highly satisfied customers. In fact, Kudler Fine Food provides a very competitive total reward system. Their compensation philosophy is to attract, motivate and retain the most qualified individuals, thus ensuring that the company achieves its mission and goals. Kathy purchases relate mostly to capital or repair items for all three stores. Kathy prepares advertisements and places the articles in the local newspaper. The department managers are responsible for maintaining high customer service levels for the items they sell, which is carrying a higher level of inventory but not excessive service level. Kathy monitors what other gourmet foods are offering, what is being advertised in gourmet magazines and what is show up on the websites. After finding some new interesting items, Kathy introduces these items to the managers and they decide on the items and the prices of the new products. The Kudler Fine Food has implemented all these functions within the organization culture.

Organizational Structure at Kudler Fine Foods

At Kudler, the organizational structure seems to be directed towards a democracy rather than a dictatorship. Kathy Kudler is constantly trying out new products for her store and asking her team for feedback on the products before introducing them to their customers (Apollo Group, 2004). One might see Kudler Fine Foods as a decentralized organization because of the rapidly changing environment, however with a closer look one can see that Kudler Fine Foods is actually centralized. While employees under Kathy Kudler have input on product placement, Kathy ultimately makes the decisions, which represents the organizational hierarchy mentioned by Gomez-Mejia and Balkin (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin, 2002) With short product life cycles and an environment that is ever changing rapidly at Kudler, they resemble also resemble baseball team culture (Gomez-Mejia, 2002, p.116). At Kudler, they are always innovating new ideas to bring in new customers and keep the ones they have acquired. Kathy Kudler and her team have thought up creative marketing strategies to draw customers into their store. One of which is offering parties in the store, which show customers how to prepare specialty food. The impressive part about this marketing strategy is that party’s are taught by world renown chefs, local celebrities, and Kathy Kudler herself (Apollo Group, 2004). This is just one of the many ways Kudler is working to stabilize their fast-paced, competitive market.

I believe that this type of management style is effective for Kudler Fine Foods. The company is fairly pre-mature in the their market, therefore, they must work more as a team in order to be successful. Kathy Kudler cannot possibly know everything that is going on in the market and is smart in seeking the opinions of her workers. Trusting her team allows Kathy to attend trade shows, which insures that she is keeping up with everything that is going on in the gourmet food industry.

Leadership Style at Kudler Fine Foods

The vertical organizational structure for Kudler Fine Foods appears to be successful in its operations and performance. The organization, founded in 1998, has expanded into specialty food store chain. The three-city operation is managed by a small span of control. Because the success of the organizational is in direct reflection of the performance of the management I would have to assume that the employees are motivated about the Kudler product.

Although there are not many levels of hierarchy within Kudler there are many departments of operations. This management structure of Kudler is defined as a functional structure. Within a functional structure there are groups of individuals that have similar skills; this is comparative to the Kudler organization. The management includes Finance & Accounting, Sales& Marketing, Human Resources, Operations and Legal and Information Technology department. “Because this approach permits employees to do specialized tasks, it creates a high