GM541 Unit 5 Presence Is Service Culture Assessment Example

A Store Is Served When Its Technician Is Seen There: A Unit 5 Culture Assessment of a Refrigeration Service Firm

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Purdue University Global

GM541: Organizational Transformation and Change Leadership

Unit 5 Culture Assessment

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[Date]

The refrigeration service firm, its people and every artifact and quotation are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and studies cited are real.

Finding

Ardent Cold Service's culture rests on a shared, unstated assumption that service means presence. A store is served when its technician has been there, signed the log and been seen by the store manager. That belief explains the firm's artifacts and its stated values, and it collides directly with the sensor-driven model, in which a well-served store may not see a technician for months.

Schein's Three Levels

Edgar Schein reads culture in three layers. On top sit artifacts, the things a visitor can see and hear. Beneath them are espoused beliefs and values, what members say matters. At the bottom lie basic assumptions, beliefs so long unchallenged that members act on them without noticing (Schein, 2010). He argues that artifacts are easy to see and hard to interpret, and that the assumptions beneath them explain what the artifacts mean (Schein, 1990).

Level 1: Artifacts

An outsider spending a week with Ardent would notice four things.

The service log. Every compressor room has a clipboard or binder where the technician records the date, readings and work done, and signs. Store managers check it; regional managers audit it. Technicians describe an unsigned month as a failure, even if nothing was wrong.

Route notebooks. Senior technicians carry spiral notebooks with handwritten notes on each store's quirks: which compressor short-cycles in August, which case door the night crew leaves open, which manager wants a call before any repair. These notebooks are not company property, and several technicians have kept theirs for more than fifteen years.

The Fewest Callbacks jacket. Each year the firm awards an embroidered jacket to the technician with the fewest repeat callbacks on their route. Winners wear it for years.

Holiday cards. Store managers send holiday cards to technicians by first name, and technicians bring them into the branch office, where they are pinned on a board.

Level 2: Espoused Values

The branch office wall carries a poster reading "Cold Is Our Promise." The sales brochure promises "your technician, every month, in your store." The firm's mission statement, revised two years ago, speaks of "reliable refrigeration through proactive service and modern technology." The first two statements describe presence; the third, newer one describes outcomes and technology. Field staff quote the first two and rarely the third.

Level 3: The Underlying Assumption

The artifacts and the older values point to one belief that nobody at Ardent would state, because nobody has needed to: a store is served when its technician is seen there. Service, in this view, is not an outcome measured in temperatures; it is a relationship expressed in visits.

Two kinds of evidence support the assumption beyond the artifacts.

Renewal meetings. In contract renewal meetings observed for this assessment, account managers defended price by counting visits: "Your technician was in your store fourteen times this year." When one grocery chain's facilities director asked about case uptime, the account manager did not have the figure and moved the conversation back to visits.

Technicians' descriptions of a good month. Asked to describe a good month, eleven of twelve technicians interviewed described it in terms of stores visited and logs signed, not failures prevented. One said, "A good month is when every manager on my route has seen me."

Ardent's people do not believe sensors are bad; they believe that a store nobody visited is a store nobody served, and the sensor model asks them to call that store a success.

Why the Assumption Matters for the Change

Sensor-driven service with uptime contracts asks the firm to define service by outcomes. Under the new model, the best-served store might go a quarter without a visit, because nothing in its data suggests a problem. Every artifact at Ardent tells technicians that such a store has been neglected. The unsigned log, the empty notebook page, the missing card on the board: each signals failure under the old assumption and success under the new one.

This explains several behaviors that earlier units examined. Shadow visits, in Unit 4, are partly about gaps in the sensors, but they also let technicians keep signing logs. Account managers' difficulty selling uptime contracts, noted in Unit 2, follows from an assumption that price is justified by presence.

A Second Reading

Joanne Martin's work on organizational culture warns against assuming a single shared culture and distinguishes integration, differentiation and fragmentation perspectives (Martin, 2002). Read through differentiation, Ardent has at least two subcultures. Field technicians and account managers share the presence assumption strongly. The monitoring room analysts, mostly hired in the last two years and many from outside the industry, hold a different assumption: a store is served when its data are good. The two groups describe the same week of work in opposite terms. Any change strategy will need to bridge them rather than assume one culture.

Where the Assumption Came From

The belief did not arise by accident. For most of Ardent's forty-year history, a visit was the only way anyone could know a store's equipment was healthy. Technicians read gauges, listened to compressors and checked case temperatures by hand, and the signed log was the only record that someone had looked. The assumption that presence is service was, for decades, simply true. Store managers learned to trust the technician they saw each month, and account managers learned that visits were the easiest thing to count. What has changed is not the value of care but the evidence that care has happened. Sensors now provide that evidence without a visit, and the culture has not yet caught up with the fact that its oldest belief has lost its basis.

What Would Have to Change

Schein suggests that assumptions change when people experience new behavior working, so that a new belief is learned from success (Schein, 2010). At Ardent, that would mean making outcomes visible in the same ways visits are: posting case uptime by route where the holiday cards hang, awarding the jacket for the fewest warm-case hours rather than the fewest callbacks, and giving account managers uptime figures for every renewal. The service log might also change rather than disappear, recording what the data showed each month alongside any visit.

Limits

The assessment is based on one week of observation, twelve technician interviews and three renewal meetings. Assumptions are inferred, not observed, and another observer might name the belief differently.

References

Martin, J. (2002). Organizational culture: Mapping the terrain. Sage.

Schein, E. H. (1990). Organizational culture. American Psychologist, 45(2), 109-119. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.2.109

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.