Introduction
The Goldman Sachs is a leading brand in the financial services sector. It has the same marketing message throughout its global markets although the ingredients used and the price is determined by a country’s economic condition and culture. The brand management always considers the two before introducing it to the markets because of a strong relationship between the brand and culture though they are separate disciplines.
They have also tried to reflect the meaning of brand in terms of cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives and have hypothesized that the religion, culture and other socio-cultural factors have some direct influence on the brand strategic management.
In order to address modern challenges that the organizations like Goldman Sachs are facing today, various scholars and researchers have suggested some interventional strategies. Which mainly focuses on the interaction level between the employees and targeted customers in the context of their cultural affiliations because it can be enhanced through developing synchronization between their cultures (Ruffino,49).
Goldman Sachs Performance Analysis
During the fiscal year of 2010, Goldman Sachs faced a number challenges. Still, the company revived its trust among the consumers by adopting diversity and offering services. Goldman Sachs reduced absenteeism and increased performance through this approach.
In order to revive performance and win back customers, the company started a scheme of bonuses for all employees if they achieved the benchmark levels of performance set by management. This policy showed significant changes in behavior and returned the company to profitability. The second kind of behavior learning is through negative reinforcement.
Punctuality is a persistent issue at almost every firm in the world. In order to reinforce a desirable behavior by removing the negative reinforce, the likelihood of repeating the negative behavior is diminished. Not until employees were pressurized and threatened that unless their punch cards were punched with the times, the employees would not be paid.
After a few reminders, the employees were using the time clock. Here, the possibility and threat of not getting paid served as a negative reinforce to get a desirable outcome of getting punched cards. Punishment serves to reduce the occurrence of the undesirable behavior. In extinction, the undesirable behavior is completely eliminated from being repeated by the individual.
Effectively Managing Diversity at Goldman Sachs
Diversity plays a significant role when it comes to efficiency of management and workers throughout the organization. It helps companies retain employees by encouraging them to work together to identify, discuss, and solve a variety of issues and welcome constructive conflict to solve their problems.
This approach has helped Goldman Sachs helped to solve a variety of customer problems as well and increase customer satisfaction.
Every person has a different style of thinking and utilizing his or her cognitive abilities. Some people are more inclined towards arts and some towards sciences and mathematics. This is termed as right brain thinking or left brain thinking. In any typical organization the amount of brain power used is rarely above 50 per cent.
As the seniority of the management increases and they become more cynical, the brain power reduces to a maximum usage limit of 35 per cent. In this competitive business world when organizations are seeking a sustainable competitive advantage, corporations should look towards building a culture that raises benchmarks of mental performance.
Goldman Sachs is a renowned regional financial service and provides personal banking, investment, lending services and advice to members to improve their financial well-being. They have employed the Whole Brain Dominance method in their organization to improve the communication and efficiency within the management team to assist with a cultural change towards better relationships with members and employees.
The management team of the company is engaged in a one day training session run by regional training specialist. By the end of the session, each member of the management team was able to identify their strengths and how they could leverage their strengths and improve weakness to be able to support the team (Ruffino,2009).
All this information proved out to be pivotal for the organization and managers. The result was a success leading to the whole team operating more effectively and opening communication between team members.
The company makes use of affirmative action in order to balance the organization. Nevertheless, if affirmative action is coupled with valuing of the differences, to some extent it will work better, if developed within that particular organization.
They must organize programs, which are designed to foster the awareness of the differences and acceptance of cultural differences. The lack of understanding may worsen situations but if organizations bridge cultural differences by these programs, the employees would be able to work efficiently together (Goldman Sachs)
According to Lynch (26), corporate strategy reflects the arrangement of objectives and goals of a corporation and a devising plan to meet those objectives. They are usually narrated to describe the present status of any company or to predict the future scenarios of the company. Two important aspects of corporate strategy are the sustainable competitive advantage and the value added resources or developments.
The major sources of sustainable competitive advantage include differentiation, low costs, niche marketing, high performance technology, superior quality, superior service, vertical integration, synergy, culture, leadership, and structure of organization.
Sustainable competitive advantage is the utmost requirement of strategic management research and practice. It has been developed that the organizational identity may serve as the supplement of sustainable competitive advantage because it designates an organization with the distinctive advantages over its competitors that it holds.
Various schools of thoughts provoked diverse concepts of organization theory. As a result, a sharp contradiction whilst conceptualizing organization theory could not integrate thinking among organizations. The new ideas emerging in organization theory should encompass novelty, consistency, and reliability.
However, the facts revealed that an overwhelming contradiction could be viewed in the existing schools of thoughts due to diverse and uncorroborated ideas. In order to reduce this contradiction, the organizations should adopt adaptability while reframing their organizational structure in accordance with changing trends (University of the Pacific, 123).
The element of diversity has also become a critical factor for organizational management these days. To work through such critical challenges, the organization theory should also contemplate diversity during this current era. The inter-organizational systems approach necessitates the incorporation of diversity so that the changing objectives of organization can be achieved accordingly.
For this very purpose, the educationists needs to revise the prevalent concepts of organization theory on the basis of modern trends so that the prospective leadership should hold extensive knowledge and must be capable to adapt with diversity and environment (Johnson & Fauske, 25).
Goldman Sachs has already strived through various challenging periods since its inception. However, this company still needs to implement novel concepts of organization theory so that it can meet the consumers’ demands with every change in environment. Goldman Sachs, though, has faced many challenges but still its leadership was competent to go through.
Affirmative Action in the Goldman Sachs
The operations in human resource section of Goldman Sachs has been changed by Affirmative action. In fact, the CEO of Goldman Sachs realized that he must create an atmosphere of fairness in the process of admitting employees into the company in order achieve success (Dooley 129). Several laws that regulate the employment processes have been enacted to promote the diversity.
These laws take into consideration all sections of society during hiring as well as the humane behavior based on remunerations, employment conditions and dismissal of employees. Affirmative action is a result of the demand from numerous activists and trade unions, who demand for fairness in the processes of employment.
In compliance, the Goldman Sachs has steadily embraced the affirmative action (Johnson and Fauske 120). Goldman Sachs has established a number of frameworks through which affirmative action can be achieved whereby inclusive recruitment course is one of them.
Recommendations for Interventions
According to Barak and Levin (22), the diversity of workplaces has led us to various serious issues, such as exclusion and lack of interest in organizational information.
LeFevre, (127) has also devised the conflict management strategies based on cultural diversity because they believed that strong interaction between heterogeneous groups would develop more productive effects relating to job performance and overall organizational achievements (Snavely and Bianco 126).
As far as the impacts of stress upon diverse employees’ personal lives are concerned, they usually suffer from various mental and physiological problems, like aggressive behaviors, moodiness, irritation, headache, increased perspiration, increased heart rate, and ultimately, job burnouts.
There are also some social issues associated with stress, which include imbalance between professional life and personal life, improper attitudes towards organization and increased absenteeism rates (Johnson and Fauske, 45).
Thomas and Robin (229) have recommended that strong leadership skills should be in the workplace, which should manage stress through team building and diversity training programs.
Similarly, the coping strategies have also been given importance by them because they believe that the working environment must keep the balance between the demands of employees and the organizational strategies to fulfill their demands (Kecia, 26).
Teamwork is the key element in many technical and non-technical work places (Sachs n. p.). However, the leveraging of diversity and teamwork may have direct influences on the overall performance of the team through many mediating variables. That is why; it is widely considered that the work group characteristics, communication, and task are the major indicators of team performance in relation to cognitive diversity.
However, it has also been disclosed that the systems operated by human-machines receive less benefits of team diversity and management teams in such systems have been found more efficient and result-oriented towards organizational goals and objectives (Ruffino, 52).
Similarly, communication is another important segment of teamwork, which needs to be conveyed continuously without interruption to provide support and guidance to the team. The nature of responsibilities itself is very complex in its nature because mediates the relationship between team diversity and performance management (Thomas and Robin, 229; Thiederman, 132).
According to Johnson and Fauske (24), the leveraging diversity plays an important role in performance improvement if certain conditions to control diversity programs positively and meet organizational objectives are to be met.
It was deliberated that the major paradigm shifts in the U.S. labor markets developed diversity in the work places successfully when the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated the diversity in the field of labor because the managers felt at that team diversity should be criterion to hire talented work force (Dooley 126).
Additionally, this criterion of team diversity also led to the inclusion of new labor markets, enlarging the client markets for recruitment of labor pool.
In other words, multiculturalism was promoted in the name of team diversity by the various labor markets of the United States in order to accommodate diverse people as corporate citizens. The major activities as initiatives of team diversity included recruitment, skill retention, leadership development, external partnership, communication, training, and staff management (Ruffino,49)
Conclusion
Goldman Sachs should develop comprehensive tools of human management. However, the company should explore opportunities in the area of diversity and competitive pressure because these are the very areas through which company can grow further if it comes up with sustainable plans.
Works Cited
Dooley, Kevin. “Organizational complexity”. in International Encyclopedia of Business and Management. London: Thompson Learning, 2002. Print.
Johnson, Bob. & Janice Fauske. “Introduction: Organization theory, educational theory, and educational research”. Journal of Educational Administration. 43.1 (2005): 5-8.
Kecia, Thomas. Diversity orientations- Diversity dynamics the workplace. Toronto: Wadsworth Publishers, 2005. Print.
LeFevre, Joseph. “The Value of Diversity: A Justification of Affirmative Action”. Journal of Social Philosophy. 34 (2003): 125–133.
Ruffino, Carr. Managing Diversity. New York: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2009.
Snavely, Kathryn and Peters Bianco. Cross-Cultural/ International Communication; Exporting; Globalization, 2010.
Thiederman, Sondra. Making Diversity Work: 7 Steps for Defeating Bias in the Workplace. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2008. Print.
Thomas, David and Ely Robin. “Cultural Diversity at Work: The Effects of Diversity Perspectives on Work Group Processes and Outcomes”. Administrative Science Quarterly. 46.2 (2001): 229.
University of the Pacific. Cultural Diversity: Leadership Needed. 2006. Web.
Sachs, Goldman. “Who We Are“. 2011. Web.