Nokia Change Management Case Study
Company background, factors influencing organizational change, how organizational change unfolded, reference list.
Nokia Corporation is an international communication firm whose headquarters are situated in Espoo. The company is popular for manufacturing mobile phones. In addition, the company manufactures other consumer products like mobile networks, set-top boxes, and apparatus for broadband internet.
Moreover, Nokia Corporation supplies the motor industry with car speakers (Kautto 2009). Currently, the company dominates the mobile phone market with a market share of over 38.6 percent. In 2010, Nokia’s financial income was $2.6 billions. Engineer Fredrik Idestam established the company in 1965.
During this period, the company dealt with paper products, which it exported to Great Britain and Russia. In early 20 th century, the company concentrated on manufacture of wheelchair frames and rubber boots. Even today, some brands of bicycle tires bear the company’s name.
The modern Nokia Company was established in 1967. The management brought the former paper mill section and the rubber works together to establish a technological company. In 1981, a mobile network was launched in Scandinavian, prompting Nokia Corporation to manufacture its first car phones.
In 1987, the company manufactured its first mobile phone. At the same time, Nokia Corporation helped Finland, Germany, China, Poland, Italy, and Mexico to repair network for their entertainment industries (Ropponen 2008). In 2010, Stephen Elop joined the company’s management team.
Nokia Corporation merged with Siemens to form one of the biggest telecommunication networks dubbed Nokia Siemens Networks.
Currently, Nokia Corporation is among the companies that manufacture quality smart phones globally. The company continues coming up with novel inventions in line with the emerging technologies.
In 2004, Nokia Company started restructuring its operations as a way to satisfy customer aspirations. The company came up with a program dubbed “the Nokia Booster program”, which aimed at bringing together online customers and the company’s strategic development (Schienstock 2004).
A number of factors contributed to the restructuring process. Among them include desire to, attain global coverage, embrace employee empowerment, promote co-creation, and support the community.
One of the key factors that prompted Nokia Corporation to come up with the Nokia Booster program was the pressure to exploit the global market. The company was in need for establishing a single access point through which it could communicate with all its target consumers, and employees worldwide.
Prior to the program, the company relied on a communication structure where information was conveyed from the top management, down to the employees through a number of senior staff (Schienstock 2004).
Such a communication structure was slow. Consequently, the company required a communication structure that could keep pace with the contemporary marketplace.
To enhance its performance, Nokia Corporation required having a platform through which it could share its agendas with employees. Previously, employees made limited contribution to organizational policies (Krell 2000).
To make sure that employees backed the company’s agendas, Nokia Corporation had to come up with mechanisms that would captivate the employees. The company learnt that employees could be active if allowed to manage debates that fascinated them.
To achieve this, the company assigned different employees to different agendas and requested them to share the agenda with the public. This helped the company to gather information from the public, therefore, aligning its operations with customer needs.
The program helped the company to reach its target customers in remote areas where it was hard for employees to reach (Nonaka & Teece 2001).
Through the program, customers shared their views about the company and changes they wish the company to make, thus, spurring employee creativity. Indeed, the program led to numerous innovations in the company.
Management team in Nokia Corporation maintained that, for the company to perform, it required exploiting the vast experience and knowledge; its employees possessed. Nevertheless, it could hardly achieve this without fostering cooperation between the employees.
Senior managers came up with ideas concerning the innovations they would like to introduce into the company (Masalin 2003). The company then disseminated the ideas to employees and customers through the Nokia Booster program.
The program helped the company to establish a platform by which it could get opinions from all the stakeholders, therefore, coming up with products that meet all the desired specifications. Besides, the company needed to be sure that its employees are aware of the value of the projects the company initiates.
Nokia Corporation could achieve this by involving the employees in formulation and implementation of the projects (Masalin 2003). The Nokia Booster program acted as an avenue through which the company fostered cooperation between employees in different departments.
In a span of six months, the company had started witnessing inventions as employees seek to enhance organizational operations. In addition, employees shared ideas on changes they considered unfeasible, thus, helping the company pursue feasible goals only (Masalin 2003).
In 2004, Nokia Corporation made it public that it intended to begin organizational change, which aimed at helping the company meet changing consumer needs. The company reduced the number of its business units to four. It implemented the entire change within one week.
To implement the change, the company required a hundred employees taking new jobs. All the other employees retained their original jobs. Nokia Corporation reconstructed its initial modular teams (Ropponen 2008).
The company established a common platform through which all employees shared their ideas to help the company to address customer ambitions.
Ropponen posits, “The genesis of the Booster Programme, launched in late 2008, could be traced to the wide involvement of the strategy-planning process and to the flexibility and project orientation of the modular structure” (2008, p. 163).
The program started with a design team led by Ian Gee and Maximilian Kammerer. The design team argued that the traditional system of communication made it hard for the company to achieve its goals. Hence, the company required a platform that would help it involve all its stakeholders in pursuing organizational goals.
The design team resolved to organize a workshop “with team leaders followed by the much broader involvement of the whole community through an online social network community” (Masalin 2003, p. 69).
The corporation organized for workshops in different cities across the globe. At least a hundred change leaders participated in every workshop.
After the workshops, participants went back to their organizations, where they recruited employees into the adopted change processes. Online community took the centre stage in steering the changes.
This mishmash of traditional communication mechanisms and novel forms of relations established an upsurge of fervor (Masalin 2003). The Booster led to open discourse between frontline workers, community members, and managers about challenges affecting the company.
The online community furnished employees with information concerning potential changes that could benefit the company, therefore, helping them initiate innovations.
Kautto, P 2009, ‘Nokia as an environmental policy actor: Evolution of collaborative corporate political activity in a multinational company’, Journal of Common Market Studies , vol. 47 no. 1, pp. 103-125.
Krell, T 2000, ‘Organizational longevity and technological change’, Journal of Organizational Change Management , vol. 13 no. 1, pp. 8 – 14.
Masalin, L 2003, ‘Nokia leads change through continuous learning’, Academy of Management Learning & Education , vol. 2 no. 1, pp. 68-72.
Nonaka, I & Teece, D 2001, Managing Industrial Knowledge: Creation, Transfer and Utilization , SAGE Publications Ltd, London.
Ropponen, T 2008, ‘The Nokia story of using action learning’, Action Learning: Research and Practice , vol. 5 no. 2, pp. 161-165.
Schienstock, G 2004, Embracing the knowledge economy: the dynamic transformation of the Finnish Innovation System , Edward Elgar Publishing, Northampton.
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IvyPanda. (2019, July 3). Nokia Change Management. https://ivypanda.com/essays/change-management-in-nokia-company/
"Nokia Change Management." IvyPanda , 3 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/change-management-in-nokia-company/.
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Organisational behaviour, change management and motivation seen in the case study of Nokia and organisation-wide changes like mergers and acquisitions, employee psycholigical contract (ADKAR, Maslow, Hertzberg, Pink)
MBA student, chichester University Addressing the individual's relationship to change and motivation can allow us to significantly reduce the impact of structural organisation-wide change on the individual worker, through this their associated teams, departments and the organisation as a whole. Applying this to real workforce situations within Nokia, where poignant situations have arisen resulting in increased change resistance due to not addressing awareness and desire creation, change fatigue and failure to address the people side of change.
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The Rise and Fall of Nokia
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- Provide insight into the nature of disruption in an established industry and why incumbent firms struggle to adapt.
- Examine the different paths companies should take to respond to disruptive forces.
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- Identify strategies companies can use to adapt quickly to disruptive changes.
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