Reducing bureaucracy and encouraging a proactive attitude throughout the workplace

CENTRE FRANCO-VIETNAMIEN DE FORMATION À LA GETION
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GROUP ASSIGNMENT
ON ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Topic: Reducing bureaucracy and encouraging a proactive attitude throughout the workplace
Instructor : Richard WARNEMINDE
Done by : CFVG MBA 16A1, Group 2
Bui Thi Diem Huong
Do Thi Thu Thuy
Le Phong Tuan
Mai Huu Luat
Hanoi, December 2007
CONTENT
Page
PREFACE.................................................................................................
Part I - Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are widespread in Vietnam (especially in state owned enterprises)
Real situation of bureaucracy and non-proactive in Vietnam
1.2. Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are widespread in Vietnam (especially in state owned enterprises)
Part II - Solution to reducing bureaucracy and making people more proactive in Vietnamese organizations
2.1. Why do we have to change
2.2. The difficulties and challenges we face
2.3. Overcome perception challenges
2.4. Moving people up the continuum of behaviors and change the organization culture.
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................
REFERENCE..........................................................................................
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PREFACE
In recent years, Vietnam’s economy has quickly developed and integrated successfully into global business.
In November 2006, Vietnam officially became a member of World Trade Organization (WTO). This may lead to significantly positive changes to this country, but it may also make many challenges. For example: unemployment, take over, competition, dependency or to lag far behind other countries.
For those reasons, each domestic entity is required to rapidly innovate organizational structure and method of operation in order to adapt to more severely competitive business environment and moreover extend scope of activities worldwide. It aims to reduce bad impact and catch good opportunities originated from globalization.
However, after 2 decades of innovation, many organizations in Vietnam on all fields are managed and ruined under bureaucracy, especially state-owned enterprises.
Therefore there is an issue which should be discussed that specify causes and propose solutions in order to come to wipe old vestige and create new structures and institutions. This aims to build an dynamic business environment and Giúp each person to promote the whole ability, to contribute to socio-economic development in a new era.
So, senior members of the Vietnamese government and top business leaders also have repeatedly publicly stated that Vietnamese organizations must improve significantly to compete internationally. This has now become urgent because of Vietnam's becoming a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Experts state that there are two areas in particular which must be addressed:
• Bureaucracy must be dramatically reduced.
• Individuals must be more pro-active. They must show initiative, make decisions and implement them
PART I :Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are widespread in Vietnam (especially in state owned ENTERPRISES)
1.1. Real situation of bureaucracy and non-proactive in Vietnam
The bureaucracy and non-proactive in Vietnam reflects clearly in state owned enterprises (most in structure and people) where:
• The input and output of state owned companies in Vietnam are set from top down, each state owned enterprise is a party who performs a specific function assigned by the state. Vertical structure is still widely applied.
• Power distance is still strong as most junior employees think that seniors have a lot of experience about work and they know all the things so there is no way or chance to change. Ascription is overwhelming, people are evaluated by their working years not on actual results.
1.2. Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are widespread in Vietnam (especially in state owned enterprises)
Through many studies, there are a lot of reasons but some of them are overwhelming: (structure, context, environment, commitment, perception, attitude)
• Most of state owned enterprises are structured with functional orientation (vertical designs): each individual has his/her own job and only focus of that. The word “complete” means that he/she completes one part, that individual is not taught or trained to be responsible for the whole job.
• Their perception is affected mostly by their colleagues that the managers, supervisors are always correct and right because they have plentiful of experience of the job.
• Individual only concentrates on the job assigned and not concerns about customer’s satisfaction, final result of the team work.
• Definition of team work is to group in a team but work individually, in another words, it can be said “individualism in collectivism”, individual wants feedback about their own performance as a member of a team first and then for the whole team.
• Culture of information sharing is weak in Vietnam especially in state owned enterprises where the person who has information is the one who has advantage. So if they have information, experience or valuable lessons, they keep for their own. Information is considered as tangible asset and if someone else know, that means you lose.
• Speaking up capacity of employees is quite little, people have ideas, however, they look at the example of precedents (that a lot of people with idea speaking up are sacked or rejected). State owned enterprises which depend mostly on state budget are not usually willing to take risks from new idea reality.
• The ideas which are carried out in reality are the ones that come from the top of the companies (board of managers) who stayed far from the real situation.
PART II - SOLUTIONS TO REDUCING BUREAUCRACY AND MAKING PEOPLE BECOME MORE PROACTIVE IN VIETNAMESE ORGANIZATION
2.1. Why do we have to change
Why we need to change our organization, to reduce bureaucracy and to encourage employees especially managers to be more proactive?
Vietnamese students have done very well in international competitions and brought home a lot of prizes and medals but the competitiveness of Vietnamese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) is decreasing, SOEs are loosing in international market and even in domestic one, the growth rate is rather low compared to the private and foreign sector although they get a lot of subsidies and privileges from the government. The cause of the problem here is not the ability of the people but the way our organization do business, the old culture of the organization, the bureaucratic style.
Vietnam joined WTO in late 2006 and the competition is being more and more fierce, a number of foreign companies in every fields are coming to VN to do business. If we want to compete we have to reorganize our structure and to change our working style if we do not change and do not change immediately we can not survive. Like a legendary CEO once said: “in order to survive tomorrow we have to learn to kill ourselves today”.
2.2. The difficulties and challenges we face
The need for Vietnamese SOEs to change is obvious and urgent but why people do not want to change and only a little progress has been made so far. We should study and understand the causes in order to have the right solutions to the process.
At first we should think that it is very difficult to change the culture of an organization which has existed for a long time and if we do not allocate enough thinking and resources failure is more likely than success. The culture always defends itself. It is nature that companies only change when “there is a sufficient significant emotional event threatening to bring real fear or pain”. There are people who like the current situation, the director of the SOE, who has a lot of power and privileges with very little responsibility. He or she can make money irrespective of the balance sheet of the company. He (in fact) does not have to be responsible for the company’s result and does not have to worry about losing his job. Many managers and workers may think the same because they are having stable job, and they still think that the government will continue to support them so the threat of failing the competition or going bankrupt is somewhere far in the future.
One of the cause that people do not want to change is that Vietnam has come out from thousand of years in the feudal regime , where the king and the mandarins had power and privileges over the other and people think that makes sense, the power distance is rather high, most people accept that some one has more power than other as a matter of course. People normally think of themselves first (high individualistic) and their interest is placed above that of the organization’s and generally Vietnamese people often consider short-term perspective only that is why Vietnamese employees are not proactive. SOEs can not do the way they have been doing, the need...