Sun Hydraulics - Bob Koski

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Collaboration: Sun’s core business was in the specialized component market; while it was small collaboration consisted of a design table in the “family location”. The size of the company made it relatively easy to get the right people involved at the right time but, imagine how this would play out today where the need to collaborate with colleagues around the globe is constant. In a global, flatten world this rather laissez faire attitude toward design and development would definitely not support any significant growth, it would be hard to see how Sun or any company would progress beyond the “Mum and Pop” status without a more structure approach to design and development found in the more traditional organizations. Sun Hydraulic had already started to experience the effect of these issues when they moved to a bigger space “Makes it a lot harder to sing rounds with people in the next department”.

Rewards and Recognition: Goals and rewards are a globally recognized forms of employee guidance and recognition. Simply put if I have a set of goals be them for the organization, department or person and I achieve them I will be rewarded. In the Sun culture it seem that the reward was mainly job satisfaction and since, employees all had the same values their motivator did not come through goals and achieving them. Sun adopted a more casual relationship with goals. Each employee was responsible for determining what was important at that time and place and adjusted to address them (proactive personality). The case of an employee who joined to do one job and wandered around the country learning about the market in the hopes that one day he might learn something important without any concrete goals that were measurable would be difficult to manage in an expanding company with many locations in different companies. Sun would need to change this and at the very least set company goals that reflect their growth strategy. In the consulting world goals are a measure on one’s success, it is very black and white we meet our personal goals that role into the company goals. The goal system insures fairness all locations and levels have goals that are appropriate and are measure accordingly. A lot of the engineers that joined Sun did it because they liked the company and therefore even though they were not pay a lot they joined and stayed. This does not mean that other countries would be willing to forego monetary rewards. Having said that by 1985 Sun had shown a shift by awarding key engineers stock.

Conclusion

Koski methods worked while the company was small and while he was able to control the cultural direction of the company. However, he failed to take into account the need for future growth; Even Koski recognized that for his experimental organizational method to succeed the company needed to remain within the 200-250 employee range. The case highlights the budding problems of growth with this type of organization ‘some “old-timers” remarked that the increased size and the addition of 50 new shop workers since the move had somewhat limited opportunities for close, friendly relationships that they remember form the pervious facility’. Koski also assumed that all cultures would respond favorably to this setup i.e., the total removal of the parent child relationship within a company environment. Not all cultures prefer the low power distance culture and therefor may not be motivated in this type of environment. Finally I would say that every reason Koski cited as the hygiene factor for changing the organization structure so drastically could have been addressed within the traditional structure. For example attrition at Dynamic Control was based on either motivation or mastery becoming an issue. Companies address these problems by developing or sending their executives and employees on training courses, developing an atmosphere of empowerment and by rewarding performance.

References

School, Harvard Business. "Organizational Behavior Vourse Pack." Sun Hydraulics Corporation ( A and B) ( Abridged), 1991.