Draft a report based on "How Coca-Cola Took Control Of Its Culture: Case study "

History

On May 8, 1886, Dr. John Pemberton served the world’s first Coca-Cola at Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta, Ga. From that one iconic drink, we’ve evolved into a total beverage company. 

More than 1.9 billion servings of our drinks are enjoyed in more than 200 countries each day. And it’s the 700,000 individuals employed by The Coca-Cola Company and 225+ bottling partners that help to deliver refreshments across the globe.

Brief Introduction

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) is a total beverage company with products sold in more than 200 countries and territories. Our company's purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. Our portfolio of brands includes Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta and other sparkling soft drinks.

Coca-Cola Vision

Our vision is “to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit.” And done in ways that create a more sustainable business and better-shared future that makes a difference in people's lives, communities and our planet.

Coca-Cola Culture

The Coca-Cola Company is committed to prioritizing career development increasing transparency and providing flexibility and choice on how career growth is achieved. Growth is all around us and looks different for each employee. We believe that skills and experience acquisition are what help our employees accelerate their growth and accomplish their goals. We can reach higher and go further when we invest in each other. Together, we’ll build a better-shared future by maximizing the amazing potential of what will always matter most: people.

Employees are encouraged to build their enterprise and functional skills to become future-ready. This is accomplished through structured learning, working with colleagues from across the network, and taking on development assignments to get on-the-job learning. We provide digital learning offerings across a variety of topics for self-paced exploration and cohort-based experiences to learn with and from others.

We believe everyone is a leader, and everyone’s leadership journey is unique. Leadership is less about a formal position and more about the act of leading. Every employee has the ability to lead in their own way and can do so by exemplifying our leadership behaviors.

At Coca-Cola, our leaders strive to be role models, set their team’s agenda, and help people be their best selves. We provide our managers with the tools, training, and support they need to enable their teams to reach our growth objectives.

At Coca-Cola, we build a collaborative, inclusive workplace that empowers our employees to thrive.

This includes inspiring and supporting the growth of our people service to our communities and constantly working toward a more sustainable business. We embrace a growth mindset and believe in continuous learning to improve our business and ourselves.

Culture Coca-Cola wants to process

Coca-Cola Company following main features of its organizational culture:

1. Diversity, equity and inclusion
2. Inclusion networks
3. Gender Balance
4. Pay equity
5. Commitments
6. Business Forums

The Coca-Cola Company has successfully attained the right balance between the mean and goal orientation, as it emphasizes the importance of accomplishing the goals, and meanwhile encourages employees to take risks only if they are worthwhile.

• By focusing on the mean orientation, The Coca-Cola Company ensures that the employees must adopt ethical and integrated ways for accomplishing the assigned goals because it considers integrity as its core value. In this way, employees are encouraged to only promote healthy competition.
• By focusing on goal orientation, The Coca-Cola Company encourages its employees to put in their best efforts for accomplishing the assigned goals. Employees are not punished for sharing new ideas and taking risks. In this way, The Coca-Cola Company has successfully reduced the fear of failure from its employees.

Inclusion Networks are an integral part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy for The Coca-Cola Company. They?are employee-led, company-recognized networks formed to act as a resource to both employees and the organization. They are regionally structured, globally connected groups of employees with common interests or backgrounds who wish to?create a better-shared future for people everywhere. 

Business forums provide networking, volunteerism, and professional development opportunities focused on specific industries/skill sets. Three of Coca-Cola's Business Forums are Coca-Cola Administrative Professionals (CCAP), Coca-Cola Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), and Coca-Cola Women in STEM (CWIS).

The Coca-Cola Company’s organizational culture is more internally than externally driven. Despite ensuring a quick response to the changing customer needs, the top management openly communicates the importance of adopting an ethical attitude while responding to market needs. The company shares a strong commitment to embedding ethics and integrity into its business operations. The internally driven organizational culture has enabled the organization to use its ethical brand image as a tool to get a strong competitive edge over rival firms.

The Coca-Cola Company’s organizational culture reveals that the company is more closely related to the disciplined work culture with a vertical hierarchy and tall structure. It means the management withholds the decision-making authority and directly controls the employees’ work behaviour. Creative and innovative work behaviour are promoted by rewarding the employees with various monetary and non-monetary rewards, but empowerment and autonomy are limited due to organizations’ inclination towards strict work discipline. However, in response to the employees’ growing need for autonomy and empowerment, the management has decided to make a gradual shift from a centralized to a decentralized organizational structure. This shift will transfer some authority from the top to the bottom, and consequently, the organization will attain a new equilibrium between a strict and fluid structure.

The Coca-Cola Company, the company promotes a professional attitude among its employees. There is no obligation to behave in a particular way. At The Coca-Cola Company, diversity is promoted, and differences are appreciated. It is done to leverage the opportunities offered by such constructive differences. The Coca-Cola Company’s example shows the importance of cultivating a professional organizational culture to remain successful in a highly diversified environment.

The Coca-Cola Company’s organizational culture shows that the company has a clear inclination towards the open side. In The Coca-Cola Company, there are open communication lines and the organizational culture is flexible and well-diversified. The competitive advantage of the Coca-Cola Company also lies in its ability to manage a highly diversified workforce.

The open cultural system has enabled the Coca-Cola Company to ensure a high information flow and leverage the knowledge, skills, and competencies of employees from diversified backgrounds. Both these factors are considered important by multinational organizations like The Coca-Cola Company to timely respond to the changing customers’ needs in different geographic areas.

The Coca-Cola Company management truly understands the value of its human capital and hence prioritizes employee satisfaction and motivation. Although employees are assigned challenging goals, the management takes care of their concerns and avoids pressurizing them which may lead the employees toward burnout. The equilibrium between the task and employee orientation is attained by:

• Assigning challenging goals and offering rewards to maximize the task performance
• Providing employees with necessary coaching, mentoring, and guidance to accomplish the assigned goals
• Discouraging the employees from making overtime a common norm in the workplace
• Motivating and training the employees to manage stress and time, which is important for both- improving task performance, and improving psychological well-being.

Overall Analysis of Coco-Cola Culture

The overall analysis suggests that these individual cultural dimensions also interact with each other. For example, the Coca-Cola Company tends to balance its means orientation and goal orientation and shares a closer inclination to the mean orientation, which is interconnected with its inclination towards the internally driven dimension. Both these dimensions emphasize over ethics and integrity, and inclination towards one dimension (e.g. mean orientation) automatically predicts the organization cultures’ inclination towards the second dimension (e.g. internally driven culture).