Integrating Culture and Diversity in Decision Making – Xerox Corporation

About Xerox

Xerox Corporation is the world’s leading enterprise for document management solution and business process. It was founded as the Haloid Company in 1906 by Chester Carlson and Joseph C. Wilson in Rochester, New York city. The company was renamed as Haloid Xerox in 1958 and in 1961 it adopted the current name Xerox Corporation. In 2010, The Company acquired Affiliated Computer Services (ACS). Xerox Corporation is an international company found in over 180 countries in the world and its headquarters are located at Grove Avenue, Norwalk. The company employs over 140,000 workers worldwide and registered revenue of about $21.4 billion. Since its establishment, Xerox has been guided by six core values that include ensuring customer satisfaction, delivering excellence and quality in their services, employment of technology to develop market leadership, valuing their employees. The company behaves responsibly as a corporate citizen and requiring premium return on assets (Xerox.com, 2014a).

The company provides expertise, technology and services to enable its customers from large world enterprises to small businesses to center on their business core value and operate more effectively. Xerox offers leading-edge documentary services, technology, software as well as genuine Xerox suppliers for office printing environments of all sizes and graphic communication. They also offer IT outsourcing services and business process outsourcing.  Xerox strategy is to generate sustained shareholder value via growth in continued leadership and business services in document technology.  Xerox’s mission is to become innovators and change agents by use of Xerox Lean Six Sigma to continually search for a better manner to meet challenges of customers and to generate business outsourcing process, services and products, new technologies and IT solutions for world class government and commercial clients that ensure better results (Xerox.com, 2014a.).

Xerox Culture

The organization has adopted inclusive and diversity corporate culture. This is because the organization aims at getting employees with diverse ways of thinking and diverse ways of perceiving the world since employee of this form contain a higher potential of generating innovative solutions. Moreover, in a business such as Xerox whose livelihood is fresh ideas, this perspectives variety is a priceless resource and a strategy to attain critical business results. The organization culture focuses on ensuring a work environment where workers are treated with respect, dignity and equality to ensure that worker’s individuality infuses a high-performing teams and collaboration in attaining the organization goal.

How the Organization Shows the Signs of the Identified Culture

Currently, Xerox is acknowledged as one of the most progressive firms in the globe. It has received numerous awards and exceptional praise for maintaining and building an inclusive corporate culture. The company has embraced a high level of diversity in their employees to promote innovations and creativity. The company employs inclusion and diversity to acquire the best outcome from their employees. The organization’s goal is to make Xerox a great place to work. This is achieved via a comprehensive set of worker-centered initiatives where diversity is promoted by maturing opportunity and inclusion culture, and via measurable actions.  The company has established various initiatives structured to promote a diverse corporate community. The employees’ social groups, affinity and caucus are instrumented in supporting inclusion, opportunity and openness across the whole Xerox community.

These are vital to offer employee positive change, self-development, employee advocacy, and serve as a link of communication between the work environment and senior managers. The company has also adopted corporate champion programs which match caucus groups with senior executive to enhance and up hold open communications. Via executive roundtables, the company CEO, chairman and other senior leaders meet with different Xerox workers teams where participants share their perspectives on Xerox’s business and work environment concerns, and recognize actionable discussion items with the Company’s senior team. The company culture is also guided by non-discrimination policy where discrimination on bases of gender identity, union status, marital status, citizenship, age, gender, religious beliefs, color or race are not allowed (Xerox.com, 2014b).

Factors that Influence this Organization into Adopting the Identified Culture

Xerox has adopted inclusive and diversity culture since it is an international company that employs different people from different regions that have different culture and norms. Therefore, to ensure that all its branches adopt one similar culture, diversity is embraced. Diversity ensures different people with different beliefs and perspectives work together in harmony to promote the growth and development of an organization. Moreover diversity promotes creativity and innovation and thus promoting the development of new products or different quality ways of offering services (Cox & Blake, 1991). On the other hand, inclusion ensures that each member of the diverse workforce feels as part of the team. It involves integrating workers views and ideas in organization’s decision making and in problem solving.

This promotes the relation between the top management and workers. It also enhances the workers attitude toward the organization, promoting their quality of services toward the organization’s customers. This ensures great overall performance of the organization worldwide. In addition, inclusion ensures the elimination of discrimination based on race, age, gender, or sex orientation of the workers. Another organization culture is opportunity and open communication. The organization employ’s this culture to ensure that the organization enroll the right employees that can bring to great development to the organization. Opportunity culture also enables the organization to get new customers who has the potential of allowing the organization growth. Open communication facilities the development of good relationship between the organization and its employees (McShane, 2000).

Type of Leader Best Suited for This Organization

Xerox Company cares much about their employees and involves its workers in decision making and problem making. It also expects its workers to employ their knowledge, ideas and perspective to enhance innovation and creativity.  Thus the best form of leadership to be employed in this organization includes transformational leadership or servant leadership. This is because the two forms of leaderships create a good environment to promote the involvement of both the employees and the management in decision making and in enhancing good working environment. A servant leader puts servicing others before self-interest. It also include te entire team in decision making, offers tools to facilitate effective jobs performance, and stays out of lime-lights to ensure that the team gets credits of their good work to promote workers motivation. Transformational leadership encourages the team to pursue creative and innovative actions and ideas. It also motivates the workforce by strengthening the team commitment, enthusiasm, and optimism. A transformational leader serves as a role model, and counts on everyone and expects all its employees to give the best. The two leaderships’ styles ensure that workers are part of the organization and they are involved fully in the organization growth and changes. Therefore, leader with any of the two forms of leadership can perfectly suit in leading Xerox Corporation (Burke et al., 2006).

Culture Change in Case of Improvement Need

Reduction in the amount of product sales or services given implies that the organization’s competitors are either producing cheaper quality products in the market as compared to those of the organization in question. This simply means, the organization is facing stiff competition that if not countered may result to destruction of the organization. If Xerox experiences this kind of situation, the organization will need to integrate research and development culture in its current culture. To be able to beat competitors in the market, the organization must consider producing more unique and quality products at a cheaper price. This can only be done by investing more on research and development to ensure the development of new processes that are much cheaper. The second alternative would be changing the organization culture to focus more on customers’ retention and development. This simply means that the organization will be more considering the customers’ needs during their operation to ensure that they always surpass the customers’ needs. This will include investigation on customers’ needs and changing the organization processes to ensure that customers’ needs and expectations are met (Haan & Jansen, 2011).

Get Your Custom Paper From Professional Writers. 100% Plagiarism Free, No AI Generated Content and Good Grade Guarantee. We Have Experts In All Subjects.

Place Your Order Now
Scroll to Top