经济学人下载:老板与员工的意见分歧

Corporate culture
企业文化

The view from the top, and bottom
老板与员工的意见分歧

Bosses think their firms are caring. Their minions disagree.
老板们认为公司对员工关怀备至，但其下属却不以为然。

Sep 24th 2011 | NEW YORK | from the print edition

AS WALMART grew into the world’s largest retailer, its staff were subjected to a long list of dos and don’ts covering every aspect of their work. Now the firm has decided that its rules-based culture is too inflexible to cope with the challenges of globalisation and technological change, and is trying to instil a “values-based” culture, in which employees can be trusted to do the right thing because they know what the firm stands for.

随着沃尔玛发展成为全球最大零售商，其员工在工作的各方各面都受到了一大堆规则的限制。如今，沃尔玛已经认识到其以规则为基础的公司文化过于死板，无法应对全球化和科技变革所带来的挑战。所以，沃尔玛正尝试逐渐培养一种以价值观为基础的公司文化，在这种文化中，员工了解公司的主张，所以能够得到公司的信任，去做他们认为正确的事情。

“Values” is the latest hot topic in management thinking. PepsiCo has started preaching a creed of “performance with purpose”. Chevron, an oil firm, brands itself as a purveyor of “human energy”, though presumably it does not really want you to travel by rickshaw. Nearly every big firm claims to be building a more caring and ethical culture.

“价值观念”是管理学思维最新的热门话题。百事可乐公司已开始宣扬一个信条：“目的性绩效”。石油公司雪佛龙在自己的商标上印上“‘人类体能’的供应商”的字样，尽管它大概并非真的希望你用人力车代步。几乎每一家大型企业都宣称自身正在发展更为关怀体贴、合乎道德的企业文化。

A new study suggests there is less to this than it says on the label. Commissioned by Dov Seidman, boss of LRN, a firm that advises on corporate culture, and author of “How”, a book arguing that the way firms do business matters as much as what they do, and conducted by the Boston Research Group, the “National Governance, Culture and Leadership Assessment” is based on a survey of thousands of American employees, from every rung of the corporate ladder.

一项新的研究显示，实际情况与商家们所标榜的有差距。LRN（一家企业文化顾问公司）的老板、同时也是《怎么做到的？》（本书主张企业的经营方式与其经营的业务同样重要）的作者多弗•塞德曼委托波士顿研究集团进行这项“国家治理、文化和领导能力评估”的研究，该研究是以对来自公司各个级别的数千位美国雇员的调查为基础的。