Masters Programmes

Assignment Cover Sheet

Submitted by: u2267239

Date Sent: 27 February 2022.

Module Title: Organisational Behaviour

Module Code: IB9PVD

Date/Year of Module: 2023

Submission Deadline: 27/02/2022

Word Count: 2500 of 2500

Number of Pages: 8 contents, 13 total with cover, appendix, and references.

Question: Individual Assignment - Using concepts and readings from the module, critically
analyse an organisational behaviour problem you are experiencing (or have experienced) at
work.

“I declare that this work is entirely my own in accordance with the University's Regulation 11 and
the WBS guidelines on plagiarism and collusion. All external references and sources are clearly
acknowledged and identified within the contents.

No substantial part(s) of the work submitted here has also been submitted by me in other assessments
for accredited courses of study, and I acknowledge that if this has been done it may result in me being
reported for self-plagiarism and an appropriate reduction in marks may be made when marking this
piece of work.”

Page 1 of 13
Introduction

This essay will be on the structural change by new Information Technology (IT) Leadership at
Coventry Building Society (CBS, a.k.a. the Society), UK’s second-largest mutuality. The
Organisational Behaviour frames we will be discussing are:
A. Structure - In April 2022, the new Leadership restructured the IT department.
B. Human Resources (HR) - IT leadership are not adequately tackling issues raised by
employees.
In this paper, I will describe leadership's failures and analyse how they affect morale within CBS. A
diagnosis of the situation, with a recommendation and a conclusion.

CASE DESCRIPTION
The leadership hierarchy reaching my department:
 The CEO, Stephen Hughes, a Welshmen that is down to earth and very approachable. An
accountant by profession has broken barriers without a university degree.
 Head of CIDO (Chief Information & Digital Officer), Jayne Showell, joined in September of
2021, reporting to the CEO. Her role is to drive “Digital Transformation across the Society.”
At Severn Trent, when she was featured in CIO magazine’s top 100 CIOs. Our main
protagonist (jayne-showell-12817a7, 2023).
 Head of Architecture and Engineering Chris Davidson spent 15 years in Severn Trent
working his way up from I.S field engineer (chris-davidson-a7567733, 2023).
 Head of IT Service, Mark Gwynne, joined in October 2021 with 36 years of industry
experience and the majority at Severn Trent (mark-gwynne-71849b1, 2023).
 Lead Enterprise Architect Daniel “Dan” Jackson joined in March 2022 with experience in
utilities and from Severn Trent (daniel-jackson-a4349b63, 2023).
 Cloud Product Manager, Sam Roberts, joined in July 2022, spending three years at Severn
Trent. Starting his career as a claims assessor at Premia Solutions Limited, within six months,
he became the Head of Technical Development & Product Design (w-s-roberts, 2023).

CENTRAL PROBLEM AND SYMPTOMS

In 2020, in the heart of the global outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, I joined CBS as
a Lead Solutions Architect. The waterfall methodology (Panel, 1956) was the IT department's
structural framework, with an established system of bureaucracy. Jayne and her leadership have
brought in Agile (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001) in the form of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
(Leffingwell). These issues have surfaced from IT leadership’s implementation of SAFe:
 From C-suite to my team’s management are ex Severn Trent.

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  The first Product Increment (PI) planning session included the following:
o Guidance on what preparations from teams were needed before the event.
o In the kick-off presentation, some teams were unaware of their roles.
o Without consultation, colleagues felt stripped of duties when informed of their new
roles.
 Many colleagues do not understand what SAFe is.
 There are no answers about why the “product model” (Comella-Dorda et al., 2016,
Gottesdiener, 2019, Strong, 2021) was not chosen.
 With leadership vagueness and lack of prerequisites completed to implement SAFe have led
to the following:
o Individuals have continued working the old ways with a slight Agile twist.
o In corporate meetings, questions of Diversity and Inclusion, Leadership, Salary, and
fairness of promotions have come up consistently since I joined.
o The frustration has been shown in the Great Place to Work (GPTW) (2023) survey
scores. CBS scored 77%, over the industry average of 73% ('CBS', 2022b, 'CBS',
2022a). The industry average went from 77% in 2021 to 73% in 2022. The CIDO
function at CBS saw a 10% drop in 2022 from 70% in 2021.
o CIDO department average monthly HR turnover of ten people, the size of
approximately 500.

On August 2022, CBS’s Chief Commercial Offer, Darin Landon (darinlandon, 2023), had to remove
all customer products due to a priority 1 (p1) incident (ITV, 2022, Thompson, 2022). Other Priority 1,
2, and 3 events have happened since the changeover. The 3 rd Product Increment (PI) event separated
the entire service team, breaking the Development Operations (DevOps(Jabbari et al., 2016))
workflow.

On 25th January 2023, at the “CIDO: Strategy to Success” event, CIDO showed the 10-year vision of
CIDO and CBS. My takeaway is that leaders want to prove that SAFe was the right choice.

Page 3 of 13
Case Analysis

Frame 1 – Structure
The two structures mentioned:
1. Waterfall, “a process that takes an input and gives an output” (Royce, 1970, Panel, 1956), the
simplicity makes it work wonders for smaller non-infinite projects.
2. The Agile manifesto was written at a sky lodge in Wasatch mountains, Utah (Fowler and
Highsmith, 2001). Jayne’s choice, SAFe (Leffingwell), built upon the teaching of Agile, Lean
(Imai, 1986), Six Sigma (Tennant, 2001, 2005), Scrum (Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986,
OOPSLA, 1997), Kanban (Shingo and Dillon, 1989, Ohno, 2019), and the product operating
model (Comella-Dorda et al., 2016, Gottesdiener, 2019, Strong, 2021).

Listed below are the avoidable (Gascoigne, 2017, Kalenda et al., 2018, Dikert et al., 2016, Turetken et
al., 2017) structural tensions leadership are making:

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
Comments on how SAFe has not worked at Severn Trent or why was the product model not
chosen echoed in the GPTW survey. A symptom of human cognitive inflexibility (Watzek et
al., 2019) is shown as staff resistance.

LACK OF INVESTMENT
Jayne wants to bring in a mobile application and cloud transformation. Services and technical
debt can be 90% of total business costs (Koskinen, 2003). Customer-facing incidents have
surfaced due to Jayne’s focus (Guo et al., 2016). Now governing bodies have mandated a
Technical Risk and Resilience Program to resolve the cause of these incidents.

SAFe has proven that 100% corporate training is needed (Gascoigne, 2017). Leadership
implementation of SAFe has yet to be known to staff. The confusion has brought more
resistance.

IMPLEMENTATION DIFFICULTIES
Legislations (Meyer and Likens, 1979), costs, and workload (Zaltman and Duncan, 1977) are
the trilogy of impediments. The difficulty is evident in how time management and costs still
use the old processes (Sirkiä and Laanti, 2013). Without visual dependency chains of
workloads, cross-portfolio integrations are becoming isolated.

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COORDINATION ISSUES
SAFe has rituals (ARASHARABI, 2019, Dileep, 2022, Gustavsson, 2018) through
coordination and enforcement of Inspect and Adapt (I&A), Systems demos, and pre-PI-
planning ceremonies, which are not being done by teams.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES
Without 100% department training, interpreting SAFe is up to the individuals and teams to
decipher.

HIERARCHICAL MANAGEMENT
SAFe assumes you can matrix (Jones, 2013, p 188) existing organisational HR hierarchy with
SAFe’s organisational structure. SAFe uses Horizontal and Vertical structures (Jones, 2013,
p. 199) to exemplify both advantages. The dynamic balance (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2019,
p 521-522) between centralisation and decentralised decision-making creates agility to make
quick decisions by teams.

ORGANISATIONAL BOUNDARIES

CBS has chosen SAFe for only the IT side of the business. While the Finance, Business
Change and Branch Networks, which all heavily rely on IT, are not part of the new model.
The CIO of Capital One (Gascoigne, 2017) has noted that for SAFe to work, the entire
organisation had to change.

Frame 2 – HR
The HR lens will analyse the effects of how leaders portray themselves on employees.

Adam’s Equity theory (Adams, 1963) provides insight into the unbalance as inputs by the engineers
and not equally justifiable to the output. The GPTW survey provided answers like why salaries are not
in line with the market average. The penalty for loyalty in terms of salary when moving within the
business. Taking to Vroom’s expectancy (Vroom, 1964) with myself as the subject. I Expected that
doing a personal development plan would give me the support to succeed in climbing the ladder. The
Instrumentality was that talking to careers and development, they do not help career plans through
secondments or training for advertised roles. My Outcome is a loss of interest in wanting to be loyal
to CBS.

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Jayne’s internal network highlights how favouritism and nepotism (Tytko et al., 2020) are forms of
corruption. Such politics demotivates employees to be creative (Arasli et al., 2006, De Clercq and
Pereira, 2019). A personal take on this is that on 07-Feb-2023, I volunteered to host the CBS Live
internal summit. On 02-Feb-2023, an invitation by email to join a dinner after setting up the halls 06-
Feb-2023. I was informed in front of Jayne, Chris, and Mark that I was incorrectly invited moments
before dinner. None of them used their power to allow me to stay, yet the other two organisers did
stay. These forms of favouritism diminish the organisation’s ethics (Arasli et al., 2006, Büte, 2011).

The leaders contextualised SAFe according to their experiences (Stray et al., 2020, p. 184). However,
their IT leadership has historically been perceived as poorly trained for such transformations from
past Glassdoor reviews (Glassdoor, 2017 - 2021). One will review against when their dissatisfaction
increases (Han and Anderson, 2020). An intranet announcement for staff to post positive reviews on
Glassdoor after Jayne’s arrival. Nevertheless, both positive and negative reviews should be scrutinised
with caution. Jayne’s leadership could be construed as a façade by making unethical decisions due to
their pressures (Carucci, 2016).

The decision-making process of IT leadership echoes marketing techniques for social media
engineering (Born and Kang, 2015, Kaur et al., 2015). CBS still needs to implement a control measure
of the effectiveness of talent (Born and Kang, 2015). This imbalance keeps tipping toward bad
management. It is evidenced by the employees needing more satisfaction with Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and
Social Rewards (Bridgman and Cummings, 2021).

ERG Theory (Alderfer, 1969), a version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Cummings and Bridgman,
2021, Fowler, 2014), is an excellent way to see how the multiple forming teams from 2022s inception
have moved through group development (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). Colleagues are self-actualising
or realise their self-esteem is different from leadership. The growth mindset of the agile teams will see
a change in leadership, ways of working, or individuals themselves. Business loyalty will stay low
while leadership are biased in their decision-making.

Diagnosis

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The Structural tension applied by leadership to SAFe is creating holistic and local groups. Leadership
informality is forming groups interpreting SAFe either as a centralised or decentralised. SAFe does
define an implementation roadmap; not following the guidelines does bring “limitations” (Putta et al.,
2018). Structural misalignments are manifesting into HR motivational challenges.

The failings at CBS are reminiscent of other case studies where organisations have met the same
failures and challenges. The apparent isomorphism (Morgan, 2018) by Jayne’s leadership can be
broken down by the three forces (Heugens and Lander, 2009, Morgan, 2018, Lai et al., 2006, Beckert,
2010, Jaja et al., 2019):
1. Coercion: Jayne’s enforcement of SAFe and leadership blindly agreeing to an unplanned
model.
2. Mimesis: Jayne’s past implementing SAFe from Capital One, Lloyds, Steven Trent and now
at CBS.
3. Norms: Transforming into Agile is the hot new business trend (Brosseau et al., 2019, Cagle,
2019, Masters, 2018).

The stereotype “Agile is the silver bullet to faster output” (Ball et al., 2020). “Table 2. Summary of
challenges and recommendations.” (Conboy and Carroll, 2019) highlights similar issues faced when
businesses restructure into Agile. Many case studies are about the successful implementation with the
key points they faced(Putta et al., 2018). The current concern is the quantifiable analysis of the cost of
changing to Agile. IT leaders need to understand the problems and then make intelligent strategic
choices.

The reaction-based leadership needs to pay more attention to forming value stream maps, setting out
strategic plans, and supplying training to make progress. This negligence costs the business in high
staff turnover (Park and Shaw, 2013, Brockbank, 1999).

Trying to motivate with clear bias creates psycho-emotional behaviours in employees (Vveinhardt and
Sroka, 2020). The perception of fairness (Brosnan and De Waal, 2003, Waal, 2013) is diminished
with Jayne’s leadership showing bias toward their group. Resistance is futile whenever there is a
change; trust in management can persuade staff to believe in the shift (El-Dirani et al., 2020)

Conclusion

SOLUTIONS

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Keeping on the current course, reverting to the waterfall or another structural method are not
reasonable options for CBS. The matter of negligence, lack of understanding, not using archival
knowledge (Yau, 2019) and favouritism by leadership needs to be addressed. The solution for CBS
combines communication, leadership, collaboration, and effectiveness to build for single-visioned
performing teams (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977, Srikantia and Bilimoria, 1997, p. 401-402).
Leadership needs to perform the following:
 A well-defined vision based on “Goal Theory” (Locke and Latham, 1990).
 “Professional Bureaucracy” (Mintzberg, 1980) styled SAFe training to create cohesive
understanding (Handshaw, 2014, p 188, Tarique, 2014, p 166). Especially for leadership not
to fall victim to being classed as bad leaders (Schyns and Schilling, 2013, Goldgrab et al.,
2022).
 Heath checks on groups and individuals, feedback loop showing visible improvements.
 Praise motivates, but the credit needs to be across the board without nepotism, cronyism, or
favouritism.
 “Conceptions of Sustainability in Business Literature” (Srikantia and Bilimoria, 1997, p 391)
to reduce gaps and adherence to SAFe.
These will quash the bad isomorphic management (Jaja et al., 2019) and other issues the above
diagnosis highlights. With these standardisations the Structure will be built on good foundations.

FINAL RECOMMENDATION
The leadership at CBS needs to re-implement SAFe by defining the scope, training all staff
unanimously, clarifying how budgetary funding will work, scaling SAFe into the business and
bringing them on the journey. Transparent communication employing product showcases, bug
bounties, Fire drills, and hackathons that anyone can attend and visualise enhancements.

I commend the leadership as they are giving CBS a competitive edge. Reorganising internal and
external PEST (political, economic, sociocultural, and technological) factors are wise (King and
Lawley, 2022, p 473-476). When the eight change errors (Kotter, 2007) are made, inspection and
adaptation of transformation are needed. The right way is to educate staff (Hafeez and Akbar, 2015),
engage with employees, and ensure all relevant processes are reorganised accordingly (Beauchamp et
al., 2016, Heidari-Robinson and Heywood, 2016, Girod and Karim, 2017).

Leadership needs to follow these principles when reorganising (Gallo, 2010, Kotter, 2007):
(a) Necessary steps:
 Employees need empowerment for delegated decision-making.
 Remove barriers to change from employee feedback.

Page 8 of 13
  Present successes as proof that the new strategy is effective.
(b) Hindering tasks:
 Using distributed groups for creating and executing strategy as distinct tasks.
 Assume current processes and procedures can support the new vision.
 Urgent matters should not be a distraction from implementing the new vision.

Good ideas with bad execution of Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, or Yahoo are now cautionary tales
(Binns et al., 2014, Gans, 2017, Griffiths et al., 2019, Rao, 2020, Seuwou and Adegoke, 2022, Mercy,
2020). Businesses rise and fall. The invisible hand (Smith and Garnier, 1819, Smith, 2002) will not
create business growth. To reduce a strategies risk profile, you need:
 A succession plan, a list of names, with development plans, for the next leaders.
 Strategic leadership that enables staff’s growth mindset.
 Having visible stepped-termed plans that are actioned on time.
 Scaling the business at the right time without having blockers.
 The most crucial characteristic is having humble organisational behaviour.

In conclusion, CBS can address the problems by using the above recommendations, built from
comparable approaches of companies that successfully reinvented themselves (Anthony et al., 2019,
Siddiqui, 2022). The IT leadership should recognise that fitting a circle or rectangle into a square hole
(Able, 2022) may not be optimal. Demonstrating exemplary behaviour is an essential quality for a
leader.

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Appendix

Abbreviation Definition

a.k.a. Also Known As

Agile The Agile Manifesto
CBS Coventry Building Society
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CIDO Chief Information Digital Officer
e.g. for example
GPTW Great Place to Work
HR Human Resources
i.e. explanatory information
I.T, IT Information Technology
SAFe Scaled Agile Framework

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