MET’S INSTITUTE OF

MANAGEMENT

A Project on “Organization Culture”

A Report submitted to MET’S Institute
of Management as a part of
Organizational Behavior in partial
fulfillment of the requirements of the
curriculum of PGeMBA for the year
ended 2008-09.

SUBMITTED TO:
Prof. D.I. Cabral
SUMBITTED BY:
Rajeev Saigal
PGeMBA, Div –B, Roll No- 08111

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 INDEX
SR NO. CONTENTS PAGE NO.
1. Acknowledgement 3

2. Synopsis 4

3. Company Information 5

4. Objective of the Project 8

5. Organizational Culture 9

6. Methodology 11

7. Unfilled Questionnaire 12

8. Analysis of Questions 13

9. Conclusion 19

10. Bibliography 20

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I, Rajeev Saigal, student of MET College PGeMBA deem it

my privilege to acknowledge and remain indebted to the people
who by their rich and varied contribution have helped me in
various concepts of my project.

This project on Organizational Culture has been an

enlightening experience for me. I would like to thank my

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Professor “D. Cabral” for his encouragement, guidance, and
constant motivation which served as a driving force in the
successful completion of the project.

In Particular I am thankful to the HR for giving me the

permission and the employees of Tata Consultancy Services
Limited (TCS), who openly discussed their views and concerns,
which helped me in shaping up the project to best of my abilities.

I am still a part of TCS BPO and once had been an employee

of AFS; fortunately I have been a part of the transition myself.
Hence I choose this topic to further improve my understanding of
organizational culture.

SYNOPSIS

Culture plays an important role in the growth, expansion,

productivity and success of any organization. When the culture
changes, it brings along a change in the form of new values,
working styles, structure, beliefs and mission and vision of the
company.

For understanding the same, I have targeted employees of

TCS BPO who were earlier a part of Airline Financial Support

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Services (AFS) group. A questionnaire was designed to analyze
the understanding and interpretation of the organizational
values, beliefs and traditions of both the companies by the
employees.

The experience of interviewing them was amazing as some of

the employees spoke their heart out and a few of them expressed
their desire to go back to the old culture and style of working. I
have made my best effort in presenting the views and opinions of
all the employees regarding the transition from old culture to the
new culture.

COMPANY INFORMATION
Airline Financial Support Services (AFS)
AFS, formed in 1992, was set up as a joint venture of
Swissair (holding 75.1 per cent) and Tata Sons (holding 24.9 per
cent) as a captive BPO arm of the airlines, to perform revenue
accounting services.

AFS offers a range of services extending from airline revenue

accounting services, traffic accounting and cargo revenue
accounting to passenger interline billing, navigation support,
Level 1 h/w support and frequent flyer programme
administration.

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 AFS is poised to offer its services not just to the airlines, but
also cater to the broad spectrum of the hospitality industry.
Some of its other customers include Swiss, Tyrolean Airlines,
Sabena, Austrian Airlines, Lauda Air, Malmoe Aviation, Loyalty
Gate and Unit Pool, among others.

With a strong focus on quality, based on its internally

developed Total Quality Leadership model and a passion for its
customers, AFS has retained its position as one of the leading
providers of BPO solutions for the airlines industry.

"AFS started as a 'pure play captive arm', to provide the core

critical and complex services in airline revenue accounting for
Swissair. Over the years, the company has grown its business,
added new customers and now provides allied airline back-office
processing services as well.

Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a division of Tata Sons, is

one of the world's largest global software and services consulting
organization.

Established in 1968 in Mumbai, TCS has more than

111,000 IT consultants in 50 countries around the world.

Areas that TCS has operations in:

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IT services: System integration solutions, application
development, management services and testing solutions.

Business solutions: Comprehensive strategies and solutions that

enable customers to overcome their business challenges.

Outsourcing: Services and programmes that help optimise

discrete functions and manage business solutions and service
areas.

Consulting: Defining business goals, devising strategies,

implementing solutions and verifying the effectiveness of these
solutions.

Business process outsourcing: Industry-specific offerings,

cross-industry shared services and platform-based solutions.

Engineering and industrial services: Solutions for the

manufacturing sector — aerospace, automotive, industrial
machinery, utilities, pharmaceuticals, etc — to enable companies
to achieve engineering excellence and operational efficiency.

Business intelligence and performance management:

Business activity monitoring, business process and performance
management, and knowledge discovery and management.

Enterprise solutions: Managing supply chains, devising CRM

strategies, deploying ERP solutions, etc. The expertise here spans
enterprise product platforms, supply-chain management, master
data management, customer relationship management and e-
learning.

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IT infrastructure services: IT service desk, data centre
management, end user computing services, application
management services, command centre services and managed
security services.

Full service offerings: Integrated services across consulting, IT

services, BPO, engineering services, business and enterprise
solutions, etc.

Innovation catalyst: TCS has innovation labs that work in new

technology areas and attempt to achieve breakthroughs in new
products and standards. The areas include next-generation
software processes, human-computer interface, bioinformatics,
nanotechnology, embedded solutions and grid computing.

The company has over 1,000 global clients including eight of the
US Fortune10 companies, namely, General Motors, Ford Motors,
General Electric, Citigroup, ChevronTexaco, IBM, Verizon
Communications and AIG.

OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT

The main objective of this study is to understand and

analyse the transition process of culture which takes place when
an organization gets merged with another organization or gets
completely taken over by another organization.

In this case, Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS)

acquired Airline Financial Support Services (AFS) on February
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01, 2006 and since then there has been no looking back. The
organization has grown by leaps and bounds and has acquired
business worth five times more than AFS.

There has been a total change in the mission, vision, values,

beliefs, organizational structure and hierarchy of the company
and the objective was the study the transition process and
employee re-actions to these changes happening around.

I prepared a subjective questionnaire and spoke to a few

AFS employees, most of them being the ones who have worked
for more than 10 years with AFS. The questionnaire was designed
in such a way that it would touch all the aspects of culture.

I got an insight on the thoughts, experience and emotions

that people go through when the culture of their organization
changes; something they have to accept without any options.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Culture plays a significant role in the life of its

organizational members. It has an impact on the attitudes and
behaviours of employees. Just as society has a social culture; the
place where people work has an organization culture.

It is defined as a pattern of basic assumptions – invented,

discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with
its problems of external adaption and internal integration – that
has worked well enough to be considered valuable and, therefore,

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to be taught to new members as a correct way to perceive, think
and feel in relation to those problems.

Organizational culture starts up with a common lifestyle

adopted by its members in the form of shared learning,
behaviours, values & interests and provides the employees with a
clear understanding of the way things are done around them in
their organization. Culture is considered to be a common
perception held by their employees regarding their organization.

Organizations too, like individuals, have personalities.

Organizations can be viewed as rigid or flexible, unfriendly or
supportive, innovative or conservative.

Culture in an organization plays at different levels,

dominant culture which is shared and accepted by the majority
of the organization members, the next level to come are the sub
cultures that exist at the micro level reflecting the common
problems and situations faced by every member in the company
within his group or department.

A healthy organization culture rest on eight strong pillars of

“OCTAPACE” referring to openness, confrontation, trust,
authenticity, proactive, autonomy, collaboration and explicitness.
Organization cultures can be categorized into strong and week
cultures.

A strong culture is generally developed by a strong leader.

Besides the leadership factor, there are two other significant
factors that reflect on the strength of the organization culture.
These two factors are sharedness and intensity. Sharedness is
the degree to which organizational members possess the same
core values. Intensity refers to the degree of commitment to such
core values by organization members.

Generally an organization’s founders are the ultimate source

of its culture. Employees learn culture from different sources,
namely, stories, rituals, material symbols and language.

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 Culture performs a number of functions in an organization.
Firstly it plays a boundary defining role. Secondly it builds a
sense of identity for its members. Thirdly culture generates and
increases the level of commitment more than the self interest of
an individual. Fourthly culture increases the stability of a social
system. Lastly culture is a control mechanism that directs and
shapes the attitude and behaviour of employees.

Sometimes an organization fells the need to change its

culture. This may be due to drastic changes in the external
environment, for which it needs to adapt in order to survive.
However it is not east to change cultures and sometimes it
cannot be done successfully. Some of the hindrances include
entrenched skills, staffs, relationships, roles and structures that
work together to reinforce traditional cultural patterns. Moreover,
power stakeholders like union, management or even customers
may lend support to the existing culture.

In spite of these prominent barriers and resistance to

change, cultures could be managed and changed over a period of
time to match the competitive global requirements.

METHODOLOGY

I have selected the questionnaire method in order to

evaluate and understand the concept of organization culture.

For filling up the questionnaire, Tata Consultancy Services

Limited (TCS) was selected. This Questionnaire consists of 07
questions which are designed in such a way that they touch and

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cover all the data related to the transition from old culture to the
new culture.

I have made the respondents compare the old culture with

the new culture and then tell me the advantages and drawbacks
of both of them. Through these questions I have tried to study
the positive and negative impacts the new culture has had on the
employees and the profitability of the company.

Since I knew most of the respondents personally, I had a

healthy discussion with all of them, the length of the individual
discussion being between 10 to 20 minutes.

Descriptive answers enabled me to gather as much as

information needed to understand and present the details of the
transition from old culture to new culture.

QUESTIONNAIRE

Kindly give descriptive answers to the following questions.

Q1. Please tell me something about the organizational culture of

TCS.

Q2. How is it different from the culture of AFS?

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Q3. What kind of changes did you observe during the transition
period?

Q4. How are the organizational values of TCS different from AFS?

Q5. How difficult was it for you/was there any resistance from
your end in accepting the new culture?

Q6. Which of the 2 cultures do you feel is more favourable for

healthy growth and competition amongst the employees as well
as the organization?

Q7. Would you like to suggest any changes/recommendations

from your end to make this culture an ideal culture?

Analysis of question no.1

The organizational culture of TCS is transparent in terms of

remuneration and its HR policies. There is a high level of
employee engagement as the company pay structure motivates
and encourages employees to perform better to earn a good
amount of their performance pay. There is continuous
improvement and growth of employees through various
techniques like the T model. It is a professionally managed
organization with client satisfaction as its top most priority.

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 Employees are given high amount of respect and anyone
and everyone is addressed as an “ASSOCIATE” to make him feel
that his contribution matters.

But there are a few who feel that TCS has a cold culture, by
cold they mean that people are not bothered about you. Since
there are 1,15,000 employees one feels as if he is a drop in the
ocean and if he doesn’t make it one day to work, TCS will not be
affected much.

Others said that TCS has a dynamic culture and there are
lot of social activities which the company undertakes to help the
poor and needy. One such initiative is the TCS Maitree, it is a
non profit subsidiary of TCS which engages the employees to
come ahead and teach the under privileged children or hold a
camp in a rural area to educate them about the use of
computers. This makes them a proud employee and they are
happy to be associated with the brand name TATA.

PS – T Model is a new software designed by TCS, all the employee

data pertaining to his tenure, skill set, competencies, etc are fed
and then the software gives the three best domains where the
employee would best be suited. This model when launched will
help in smooth inter departmental transfers.

Analysis of question no.2

Every one responded by saying that AFS was a much

smaller setup with a flat organizational structure managed and
monitored by the senior management. The culture was wide open
and flexible in nature, everyone knew whom to consult if they
had a problem and there was a high standard of service delivery
and quality of work.

It was a highly professional organization with very good

board room etiquettes, strict policies when it came to meeting of

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assignments, the people were very punctual and the dress code
was purely formal with a tie being compulsory from Mon to
Thursday.

There was a high level of discipline amongst the employees

not only with the senior management but discipline being visible
at the lowest level of associates. Most respondents mentioned
that the policies and procedures of TCS are well documented but
they keep on changing regularly, by the time to understand and
digest one policy, you will be surprised to find that it has been
changed or something new is in store for you.

AFS was not much into corporate social responsibility and

the culture was very work centric. The level one associates did
the same routine job for years with very less inter departmental
transfers.

But the company functioned like one big family and the
owners had a sense of oneness and belonging with all the
employees of the organization. More than 75 % of the employees
were Paarsis and everyone knew everybody in the company.

Most surprising is the fact that the company did not have a
HR department for more than 10 years and it was only recently
that they had something called HR with a single women employee
who called herself “one women army”.

Analysis of question no.3

There were a lot of changes that happened during the

transition period with employee pay structure being the most
important and talked about. There were a few employees who
were not happy with the takeover and they left the company as
soon as the ownership changed hands. This fact is very much
true with the CEO of AFS resigning and others following suit. But
the ones that stayed benefited since the pay structure of all the
employees was revised and bought up as per the industry

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standards. People at the top management got fat raises and this
made the people all the happier with the takeover.

Another important change was the grade structure which

was changed to match with the BPO structure, the junior
associates became BPO1 and the senior most employees became
BPO 8.

The organizational structure changed completely with the

new structure being very complicated and level of approval cycle
for any request being difficult. Worst was that employees did not
know whom to contact in this new hierarchy and no one knew
who their Project Owner or Group Leader was for a while.

The billing system changed completely and the management

found it very difficult to learn the new TCS system of client
management and employee allocations.

Tie was now not required and the employees could wear
casuals on Fridays, there were many projects that required
employees to work round the clock and now the canteen was
thrown open 24/7.

Analysis of question no.4

The values of TCS are ethical, there is something called as
TATA Code of Conduct which the HR makes sure is followed by
one and all. Immense efforts are made during induction time for
all the new employees to educate them about the culture, values
and policies of the organization.

One of the respondents mentioned that TCS is not doing its

business from people but TCS is doing business with people. It

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was nice to come across people who are really happy with their
job and are high on positive energy.

The vision, mission, policies and procedures are very much

in place, if you compare this with AFS – there was a mission but
hardly anyone knew about the same. Here everything is well
defined and documented.

But there are others who feel that adequate support is not
there from people, that family feeling “Let’s do it together” is
missing and baring a new people the drive is not there in
everyone to achieve.

Analysis of question no.5

This was the most important question which has made it

clear that when the organization culture changes in any company
the employees of the company have little choice but to accept it.
The only option left here is to quit, which a few employees did as
mentioned earlier but the others have accepted it and mentioned
that there is no sense in blocking it.

Analysis of question no.6

As mentioned earlier, TCS has a performance based pay.

The appraisal happens twice a year and the final rating is decided
on the average. The pay raise depends on the rating one receives
with A being the highest and E being the lowest. This keeps the
employees on their toes all year round and they put their best

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foot forward to earn a good pay raise. There are a lot of IJP’s that
happen all year round which gives the employees a platform to
perform and excel.

If an employee is unable to perform as per the company

expectations, the company provides adequate training and
opportunities to ensure maximum efficiency and productivity
from that particular employee, this is commonly known as PIP
(Performance Improvement Plan).

Hence everyone felt that TCS provided a more favourable

environment for health growth and competition.

But there was one respondent who felt that the performance
appraisal was more fare in AFS rather than TCS. In AFS an
employee was promoted after certain years of service in a
particular grade, everyone was given an equal opportunity to
perform and excel. Only if the employee was incompetent he was
denied a promotion. But here in TCS, it is only the high
performers to get promotions and the average performers at the
managerial level hardly get a chance to get promoted. This was
observed to be a strong dissatisfier amongst the old AFS
employees.

Analysis of question no.7

The culture at TCS is dynamic and favourable for healthy
growth and competition. It is in accordance with the global
culture that demands high standards of quality and productivity.
But my respondents have a few suggestions that would help
make this culture the ideal culture.

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 According to one of them, the performance appraisal should
also consider the seniority of an individual. An employee after
certain years of experience at a particular position should be
promoted to the next level and company should provide adequate
training and development facilities for the same.

Another employee suggested that the work environment

needs to become a bit more relaxed and employees should be
given the liberty to work and enjoy. The number of social and
cultural events should increase and focus should be on employee
participation.

Also resources need to be allocated in the right areas; right

now resources are less where they are required and more where
they are not required. Effective planning and organization needs
to be done to evenly distribute the resources.

Last but not the least, one respondent suggested that the
dress code needs to be a bit more formal; employees should wear
a tie between Mondays and Thursdays because there are a lot of
client visits happening in the BPO area. Hence a more
professional image of the organization needs to be created and
presented.

CONCLUSION

Coming to the end of this project, I wish to mention that my

study at TCS has given me a lot of insight on the emotions,
experiences, changes and adjustments that organizations and its

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employees have to go through when their culture changes to keep
up with the current trends.

Here, it was important to bring in a new culture and

ownership change because TCS has the bandwidth, excellence,
resources, experience and capability to grow and excel in the
BPO industry. Since the takeover the number of projects and
employees at BPO has increased to five times the initial size only
in 2 years time. It has been able to attract big companies like
Dow Chemicals and GSK that now together form one-third of its
revenues.

The culture at AFS now known as TCS has changed

completely and I conclude that a few of the AFS employees are
still coping up with the cultural shocks as a result of the
changes. They would still prefer to go back to the old culture if
there was an option available.

Others have accepted and moved on enjoying the challenges

and opportunities that have come along with the culture change.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Book References

 Handouts on Organizational Culture given to me my

Cabral sir.

Websites

 www.google.com
 www.tcs.com

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