Rescuing Gentner

Rescuing Gentner

Introduction.

Gentner Communications Corporation develops, market and distributes products and services for the professional communications and broadcast markets. Gentner's broadband professional communications products include audio-conferencing and videoconferencing systems, sound reinforcement products, and assistive listening systems. The company's broadcast products include telephone interface and remote facilities management systems. Gentner also offers a full suite of teleconferencing services, including full-service conference calling, Instant Access Conference Calling(TM), and Web-conferencing

The case centers on how CEO of Gentner Communications; Frances Flood revamped the organization's culture to be one of the top ten small companies in America, seventh fastest-growing small companies to be exact.

Flood joined in 1996 as vice president of sales and marketing, and since then she has tirelessly worked to put the company on the map. Now it is.

And a few years back following the Sept. 11 attacks, the videoconferencing market has seen a pour in demand as executives cut back on travel. The company has responded to the current crisis with its V-There videoconferencing product line that allows its videoconference participants to surf the Web and share HTML files while communicating.

To enhance its offerings, Gentner has acquired Dublin's Ivron Systems, a developer and supplier of hardware and software platforms for videoconferencing. More recently, Gentner unveiled a brand-identity campaign. All of this seems to be working. A year before Flood arrived, Gentner racked up losses of $372,898 on sales of $13.4 million. In 2001, the company earned $1.4 million on record sales of $11.2 million in the first fiscal quarter alone.

Learning Issues.

1) Values

Values are ideals that guide or qualify your personal conduct, interaction with others, and involvement in your career. Values represent stable, long-lasting beliefs about what is important to us. They influence our decisions and interpretation of what is ethical. Some values a terminal whereas others are instrumental. We also need to distinguish espoused values from enacted values.

Like morals, they

Ð'* Help you to distinguish what is right from what is wrong and

Ð'* Inform you on how you can conduct your life in a meaningful way.

Values can be classified into four categories:

Ð'* Personal Values

Ð'* Cultural Values

Ð'* Social Values

Ð'* Work Values

Personal Values

Personal values are principles that define you as an individual. Personal values, such as honesty, reliability, and trust, determine how you will face the world and relate with people.

Cultural Values

Cultural values, like the practice of your faith and customs, are principles that sustain connections with your cultural roots. They help you feel connected to a larger community of people with similar backgrounds.

Five values that differ across cultures are individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and long/short term orientation.

Social Values

Social values are principles that indicate how you relate meaningfully to others in social situations, including those involving family, friends, and co-workers.

Work Values

Work values are principles that guide your behaviour in professional contexts. They define how you work and how you relate to your co-workers, bosses, and clients. They also reveal your potential for advancement. Values have become more important in organizations because of globalization, the need to replace command-and-control systems, and the increasing pressure for organizations to engage in ethical practices. Organizations are more effective when they align the company's values with those held by individuals and the society in which they operate.

Three values that guide ethical conduct are utilitarianism, individual rights, and distributive justice. Three other factors that manipulate ethical conduct are the extent that an issue demands ethical principles (moral intensity), the person's sensitivity to the existence and importance of an ethical dilemma, and situational factors that cause people to move away form their moral values.

The Scwartz's Value Circumplex

The Schwartz value wheel is one attempt to use Big Five ideas to classify or categorize human values.

In an extensive cross-cultural study of values, Schwartz (1992) surveyed thousands of primary and secondary school teachers in 20 countries. He chose teachers in part because their job is to be conveyors of cultural values to students. He used a correlational method to identify clusters of similar values. Based on a comprehensive statistical analysis of the correlational results, he found that value similarities and differences can largely be explained on the basis of two orthogonal dimensions, yielding a value circumplex. The two dimensions are:

Ð'* Self-enhancement (seeking what's good for me) versus self-transcendence (seeking what's good for everyone, or putting others first)

Ð'* Change (seeking to find the new) versus conservation (seeking to preserve the old)

Although Schwartz' work shows no direct evidence of being influenced by the Big Five model, what his research suggests is that values are driven by two of the Big Five dimensions. The first dimension above largely corresponds to Agreeableness (self-enhancement is like A-, self-transcendence is like A+), while the second corresponds to Openness (change is like O+, conservation like O-).

2) Ethics

Ethics derived from a Latin word is "moral philosophy". A major branch of philosophy, is the study of values and customs of a person or group. It covers the analysis and employment of concepts such as right and wrong, good and evil, and responsibility.

It