Analysis of the Dynacorp Case through political lens
Dynacorp is a worldwide information systems and communications business. In 1990 the company started to have fewer earnings than in the past, so the CEO tried to change the design of the company to run better. In this paper, I analyze this organization though the political lenses to better understand how changing the structure can help improve revenue and quality. As discussed in the book, the political lens sees the organization in terms of conflicts of interests, power, and goals among individuals and groups within the organization. The way to understand the dynamics of political conflict is to understand who has power, from where that power comes, the basis of the power and how much
This of course has its roots in marketing wanting to preserve its own turf and to highlight its own importance as a key function within Dynacorp, in possible competition with the two other key functional groups for relevance in the face of possible changes in organization design (Ancona, et al., 2009, p. M2, 29).
Product managers and cross-functional teams constitute a kind of class of stakeholders within the firm, and cuts across the different functional groups, but as the case notes, the cross-functional teams, and those teams that are focused around certain products and led by a product manager, have members that are often evaluated not on their performance in those teams, but within the context of their competence in their own respective functions. The product managers, as stakeholders, meanwhile, have their interests firmly along the line of bolstering their own capabilities and their own abilities to influence decision making around products that they pursue, even if their efforts are not always successful, and rewarded. The strong functional orientation of Dynacorp prevents such product management teams and cross-functional teams from ever getting the kind of power and influence necessary for them to be successful. The line managers and the functional managers in each of the three core functions basically hold more power and influence by dint of the strong organizational and traditional inertia present in Dynacorp, which had worked along such