A role culture is adopted in Rolls Royce Group.
Role culture is typically for a large organisation like Rolls Royce. It defined job roles clear to all the employees in the Rolls Royce group to carry out. A number of functions are divided in the group such as: HR function, research and develop function, financial function etc. and the role culture in Rolls Royce are emphasis on rules, routine and procedure and job tends to be more important than the person.
It reliance on rules and procedures.
The Company requires the directors to prepare financial statements for each financial year, which give a true and fair view of profile and loss in their divisions. The directors are responsible for preparing the annual report and the directors’ Remuneration report.
Tasks are clearly defined
They set up task clearly in order to fulfil quality of the engines.
Rolls-Royce establish working processes which ensure that they understand our customers’ needs and that then design, produce, deliver and support their products and services to customers.
The product department’s task is to
- Halve the rate of customer incidents every 3 years.
- Halve the production cost from all business processes every 3 years.
- Ten times ensure the products are not defected before delivery.
- Increase the productivity and enhance the quality.
A clear chain of command
The chairman gives a new issue to the executive director to improve the efficiency of the engine. It is not only to improve the quality of the engine but also not to damage the environment. And the executive manager set a target for the R&D department to development a new engine for civil planes by the end of 2009. They invested over £3 billion on research and development. The engine needs to save 20% of petrol. And it is reliable, safe, efficient, and affordable for the customers. Also, it is vital to reduce the emissions and noisy by 30% by the existed engines.
Advantage of role culture
As a leading engine company, maintain a low engine risk is vital. So employees follow rule and produces can reduce the change of make mistakes and produce high quality of engine. Everyone in the group has it own job role, staff know they have to do clear without conflict between colleagues and they won’t shift the possibility to others. It increases the working efficient and productivity.
Disadvantage of role culture
As the job role is more important employee. Employee tends to be less moral and less job satisfaction as the group lack of care them. Employees are no likely to express their ideas and creation freely becuase they have to follow orders and procures. Lack of sharing information and communicate more conflicts between employees. This affect the job employee and serious consequent such as: strikes, producing engine in right ways.
Communication channels
Rolls Royce group is hierarchical structures organisations more are the communication are from downward direction. Managers are give decisions and instruction. And the employees are following the rules and working procedure to achieve their jobs. There are many channels to communicate internally such as: notice, appraisal interviews, reports, Memos, face to face and e-mail etc.
Internal communications + External communications
Formal communication
In Rolls Royce, managing director has a formal meeting directly with five department mangers once a week such as: HR, R&D and financial department. During the meeting, they discuss the company policy and problem occurs in the department. For example: there are short in engineers in R&D, the R&D manager would raise the problem to discuss in the meeting.
Informal channels
Sometime the line manager wants to find out hat staff thinks abut the organisation. They would group together with some worker unofficially to tell to them. For example: the health and safety manager would ask the employee during the work hour if the group offer them enough health and safety instruction or not.
Upward communication
As we know, Rolls Royce is a leading engine manufacturer in the world. They take training and development seriously ( ICT , engine design, etc.). After that, regular appraisal interviews with their employees are take place to assess the performance. Also during the appraisal, employee are freely and openly to express their view and attitudes of the course and the group.
Downward communication
Rolls Royce is a hierarchical structure company, so downward communication is to give instruction and order to operatives from managers. For example: the Chinese airlines require the group speed up making their engines, so the production manger give instructs to engineers to find out some methods to build the engine in a quicker way.
Open communication
Open channel of communication is no restriction on whom to sees or receive the information. For example: notices to all employees about annual dinners and activities held for recreational to employees.
Closed communication
A closed channel of communication is that the information should be kept secure and confidential. For example: employees bank account and their personal details are kept confidential. It only goest to specified name people only.
For some of the training courses, they communicated in face to face. It is a direct and quick way for the employees to be instructed and trained. They would use telephones to communicate between departments.
For each department, there are lots of paper documents that need to be exchanged within the company such as letters, memorandums, notices etc. The Chief Executive will give a business report every 3 months to the chairman. They have general annual meetings and annual reports to review the business. And they would set up tasks and objectives for their departments in the coming year. The staff will receive guidelines and try to achieve the target.
The group’s businesses are world wide, so that they set up offices in different parts of the world. They put all contact details on the website or company magazines. It is easy and allows people direct communication with their staff as well as internal contact
Rolls Royce has done plenty of activities in the community. They open and introduce their enterprise for visits and interviews so that it allows the outside to know more about the organisation and how it operates.
Culture + organisational + structure + objective + communication channels
In summary, the objective of Roll Royce is to maximise profit as much as possible but without damage to the environment. High quality is what Rolls Royce pursues. They continue to research and develop new technology and products in order to provide a higher standard of living for all human beings. Service to the community is the commitment of the group.
Organisational structure and culture is built up from the objectives. The communication channels are created from organisational structure and culture. Employees make consistent efforts and take effective actions for achieve the goals.
As you know, hierarchical structures are from the lowest to the highest rank. The work is specific and classified or programmed by the manager. The workers are trained for different kinds of required skills to accomplish these tasks. Direct supervision is used to monitor the employees’ performance. The employees obey the rules and regulations and operational procedures in order to achieve the objectives. Communications are normally from top positions to low positions, which give instructions and decisions to the employees. The employees use their experience and skills to achieve the objectives.
Group meetings allow the employees to express their opinions that assist the group to continue to improve their flexibility and profits. Electronic communication technologies are the most effective way to communicate and solve problems between different regions and departments. The objectives are easily achieved when good communications are applied. Good communications also help to solve complicated structures of the company. Most of the disadvantages are sorted out. As Rolls Royce is a large enterprise, face to face communication is sometimes difficult. Culture has an important role in communication for the company. It regulates the employees’ behaviours and guides the action. It reduces the company uncertainty and provides a balance for all the staff. Staff is well co-ordinated so that they can achieve the objectives more smoothly.
For all those reasons, the turnover of the group is £5645 millions, which increases 5% per year. The profit is £285 millions, which increases 8% per year. They gained 30 per cent market share of the global business in high quality engines. There are over 54,000 gas turbines in service world-wide and more than 4,500 customers. Technology and better services will continue to meet customer needs over the next two decades. They employ around 35,000 people in 15,000 different jobs. The management ensures that all the employees perform their best in their jobs.
