Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939, by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in Palo Alto, California. Throughout the years, the HP founders instilled an organization culture that reflects their individual core beliefs, which were translated into a set of corporate objectives, management practices, and attitudes encapsulated in the “HP Way”.
HP was known for its egalitarian (employees were on the same sharing plan), highly decentralized, informal, non-hierarchical, innovative, and people-oriented culture. By 1989, the company core values such as trust, flexibility and integrity (exhibit 2) were formalized to be instilled through everyday behavior and management processes. The first element that typifies the essence of the HP Way is trust. For example, …show more content…
In fact, some of the employees mentioned such things as “…difficult to explain, and that is why we have so much trouble describing it”, and “We hear about the HP Way almost ad nauseam…I said this is overindoctrination. Some of it must be baloney”. Besides, many employees confused operating and cultural practices with core values i.e. “consensus" decision style is not an HP core value. In particular, employees had different perceptions around this notion of lifelong employment; many of them believed that “employment security”, which is not an HP core value, meant “job security”. As a result, during the 1980’s, when management policies and practices were challenged and changed, HP abandoned its previous avoidance of contract work, forward pricing, acquisitions, consolidation, and outsourcing, as a result, employees were “emotionally shaken”. As one employee put it, “For me, the greatest loss is the sense of the “HP family” that we had”, it certainly created a tension among the organization, i.e. employee satisfaction decreased steadily (exhibit 3, 4) through the 1980, and 1992 survey
HP was known for its egalitarian (employees were on the same sharing plan), highly decentralized, informal, non-hierarchical, innovative, and people-oriented culture. By 1989, the company core values such as trust, flexibility and integrity (exhibit 2) were formalized to be instilled through everyday behavior and management processes. The first element that typifies the essence of the HP Way is trust. For example, …show more content…
In fact, some of the employees mentioned such things as “…difficult to explain, and that is why we have so much trouble describing it”, and “We hear about the HP Way almost ad nauseam…I said this is overindoctrination. Some of it must be baloney”. Besides, many employees confused operating and cultural practices with core values i.e. “consensus" decision style is not an HP core value. In particular, employees had different perceptions around this notion of lifelong employment; many of them believed that “employment security”, which is not an HP core value, meant “job security”. As a result, during the 1980’s, when management policies and practices were challenged and changed, HP abandoned its previous avoidance of contract work, forward pricing, acquisitions, consolidation, and outsourcing, as a result, employees were “emotionally shaken”. As one employee put it, “For me, the greatest loss is the sense of the “HP family” that we had”, it certainly created a tension among the organization, i.e. employee satisfaction decreased steadily (exhibit 3, 4) through the 1980, and 1992 survey