pplying Structural Dynamics to Cbd in P&G

It is the purpose of this paper to offer a thorough description of the Customer Business Development department (later on referred to as CBD) of one of the subsidiaries of the multinational company Procter & Gamble (later on referred to as P&G), in this particular case the analysis is utterly focused on the Venezuelan Market Development Organization (later on referred to as Venezuelan MDO). When starting, the text will show a description of the company and some world-wide known aspects of its culture, purpose, values, thus after that it will be continued by describing the MDO of Venezuela, its leaders and special attention will be placed in the adaptation of the P&G’s culture to this MDO, then the interaction of the CBD organization among other departments will be explained, ways of its leaders behave and some motivation methods applied to the members of the CBD Organization which this text will focus.

As a theorical freamework the Ury, Brett and Goldbergs’s method of structural diagnosis for systems design is used to offer a better understanding of the factors that have any level of influence in the structural conflict of the organization, hopefully once this point of view is given the issues among this conflict will turn evident and consequently easier to expose.Additionally the organization will be described from the author point of view and this way the conclusions and recommendations will be given from an external consulting study and based on several Organizational Behavior theories that are widely accepted and teached in most Business Administration graduate schools. Even some of them are applied by the case-study company’s HR Department to other employees.The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) is an American consumer goods public corporation with a value of 138 billion dollars in 2011 (“2011 Earnings Report, The Procter & Gamble Company".

Retrieved Oct 7, 2012.) which was founded in Cincinatti, Ohio in 1837 and began manufacturing soap and candles for the local market and has had a continuous growth until its huge and powerful current situation. Along with that growth P&G is recognized around the world by its organizational behavior building proficiencies (Managing Cultural Change in P&G, from www.icmrIndia.org/casestudies) among other corporate skills.

In 2005 the company created a new matricidal heritage where the Global Business Units (GBU) of every world region leaded, but also horizontally crossed, the Market Development Organizations (MDO) in each country and such as all the changes in P&G, this huge one was also rapidly applied among all the subsidiaries and its employees, given the experience the people in the company have about applying continuous organizational changes.The matrix of heritage has horizontally divided levels commonly named “Bands” when in management positions, which allows any member of the organization to understand the level of decision making, the position inside any department or the amount of investment each person can authorize to a project, making the system very alike to identification inside military organizations. Being “Band I” the first level of management, and keeps on growing in number when growing vertically in the company, so in the heritage.Under the MDO leadership it is the Customer Business Development Organization of every country, usually conformed by one Band IV which is the “CBD Head”, few Band III identified as Team Leaders, several Band II Unit Managers, and many Band I CBD Representatives. This specific organizational heritage is commonly used in the industry, other companies such as Colgate Palmolive and Kimberly Clark also uses the same names and very similar levels of authority (Interview offered by Maximo Chacon, a very important retail customer account of the East of Venezuela. 2011.)Therefore, the distribution of the sales force structure is the Band IV’s responsibility, as the CBD Head the leader is capable of create and change any position of his team and to manage the enormous budget P&G, as one of the largest consumer goods company in the world, has to fund the push of good through the channel as fast as possible.Since the administration of the resources is part of the Band IV’s duty, but do not conforms nor affect his budget and results, but the Human Resources’ one, it has become a tradition widely accepted between Venezuelan PGers that every new CBD head the organization has will bring his own structure and sales force distribution way, based on the available theories of channel coverage, and with that, a new non-precedent investment and relocalization of human resources that cause costs and instability to the whole team, who cannot develop strong exploitable relations with customers and important loss derived from the payment of the expensive relocation benefits to many Band I and Band II employees.