KCI, a multi-disciplined engineering firm, has undergone a number of transformations over the last several decades. It started as a basement dream, was acquired and sold-off by a larger firm, and has emerged as a multi-million dollar employee-owned organization.
The folks at our Lexington, Ky. plant are well on their way to becoming owners of their company, all part of our plan to turn the operation around and make it profitable again.
The way the McElhanney Group is organized has helped foster a positive, profitable culture. Forty per cent of the key staff, around 320 staff members, own 100 per cent of the shares. Mr. Newcomb says this drives the success of the company collectively.
Protegra is a small company established in 1998 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The company specializes in the area of computer software development and business performance consulting. Protegra features a unique organizational design, characterized by a lack of hierarchy and a collegial, professional culture centred on employee and customer values. Various information systems support Protegra’s design. In the process of expanding into foreign markets and enlarging staff, Protegra has been concerned with preserving its way.
The case focuses on the vice-president and regional head of corporate banking for Noor Islamic Bank in Dubai as she arrives in the United States to promote the first global network for women in Islamic banking and finance, known as Durra.
Frieda Takaki took a deep breath, filling her senses. She was about to make a very difficult decision. She took off her shoes, placed them next to her desk and started pacing her office barefoot as she was thinking aloud. “I can’t let this business close down,” she whispered. “I have to do something about it.” The answer was now abundantly clear: why wouldn’t the employees buy the business from the owners?
Maui Divers established its employee ownership plan in 1997. Maui Divers store managers/employee owners embrace the business as their own. Although the final decision belongs to the company management team, store managers excel in increasing sales and they continuously come up with business plans in order to make the business better.
Can Mondragon Corp. Cooperativa (MCC) effectively become a global player while being truthful to the principles on which its past successes have been built?
The case looks at the two dominant Finnish retailers: S Group and Kesko. The case requires that students consider sources of competitive advantage that arise from the companies’ markedly different business models.
CEO Jim Billings wants to attract energetic, entrepreneurial talent to Stone Finch, Inc.
Bertelsmann’s EVP HR Immanuel Hermreck and his team were focused on four key HR issues. Three of these were somewhat discreet: improving Bertelsmann’s employer brand; managing Bertelsmann talent across the firm’s decentralized businesses; and ensuring early identification and appropriate development of Bertelsmann’s top 100 high potential managers (hi-pos) to better seed the company’s future top management. The fourth issue-recruitment and retention-played an integral role across all three challenges and had to be strengthened and made consistent across the firm, not an easy prospect given Bertelsmann’s highly decentralized structure.
At Coast Citrus, the employees are eligible to participate in the ESOP after completing 500 hours and/or three months of service. Currently the company is 70 percent employee owned.
The authors found that companies with broad-based stock option plans (here, defined as those where most nonmanagement employees receive option grants) had statistically significant higher productivity levels and annual growth rates than public companies in general and their peers.
The great potential of employee ownership to improve business performance lies in its capacity to bring people together to work as a team toward shared success.
In its summer, 2003 issue, Business Ethics magazine highlighted ‘The Legacy Problem’ whereby the culture and vision of a number of socially conscious corporations was being lost when the companies were acquired by larger firms.
Ask Don about what it’s like to run a company where the employees are stockholders, and he can wax warm and fuzzy.
CEO Michael Mendes has transformed a grower-owned cooperative into a publicly traded top marketer of snack foods. Diamond’s organization, culture, product development process, advertising and promotion strategy, and specifically its marketing department have been built ‘from the ground up’ to address fundamental changes in retail structure and consumer behavior. Can the Diamond model be successfully applied to other food categories?
This Teaching module shows four areas in the entrepreneurship curriculum where teaching about employee ownership can 1) put a needed spotlight on this widespread and useful practice and 2) add conceptual value and rich examples for the course topics being taught…
There are three reasons for promoting mutual building societies: they are less prone than banks to pursue risky speculative activity; a mixed system produces a more stable financial sector; and a stronger mutual sector enhances competition within the financial system.
Based on ten case studies, the report explains what motivated a highly diverse mix of businesses to consider employee ownership as a succession or start up route.
‘Making employee ownership work’ is a new guide from the Employee Ownership Association and co-ownership advisers the Baxi Partnership, based on a survey of 25 EOA member companies including John Lewis, Unipart, Arup and Mott MacDonald.
First, the authors developed a scale for psychological ownership with four components — self-efficacy, accountability, sense of belongingness, and self-identity. Second, they correlated it with transformational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, workplace deviance, intentions to stay, and job satisfaction. All the correlations were in the predicted direction. The authors concluded that integrating psychological ownership … Read More
This intensive summer course is an opportunity for participants to be exposed first-hand to a unique organizational model of participatory leadership, management, ownership and decision making by attending lecture and visiting sites at the Mondragon Corporacion Cooperative (MCC) in Mondragon, Spain.
This course provides an understanding of the human and organizational contexts in which the student will be working and the skills to put the scientific, technical and organizational knowledge learned to work in addressing the major challenges facing management and organizations today.
This paper addresses the issue of how gainsharing programs work by proposing a model of gainsharing as an organizational learning system.