Monsanto's corporate culture in Pensacola may rightly be described as innovative with restraint. The decision to go to a "team" structure, using 10-12 person groupings to solve problems of productivity and profits that had previously been handled in a rather traditional hierarchical organization, was based, originally, on cost decisions, prompted by the expense of establishing the new facility.
It is helpful to first examine the essentials of the team structure.
Each team has complete responsibility for managing the activities and productivity of its group.
Each team is structured by its members, and the members decide who can and cannot join.
Each team decides what must be done and when, how much must be budgeted for it, how much will be actually spent, and how much work will be required.
Each team is judged by established productivity and safety goals established by senior management.
This is indeed a radical approach to management, since it brings the decision-making process down to the most interactive level, making the employees feel more responsible for the success of the entire company. Although such a situation makes it appear on one level that the company has a "weak" corporate culture, since there is no driving, unified vision that is usually attributed to the idea of a strong corporate culture. In fact, the decision to adopt such a situation confirms that the company has the possibility of developing a very strong corporate culture.
This leads us to the question of whether the company is organic or mechanistic? In fact, the company exhibits characteristics of both styles. The very nature of team management, with its self-contained problem-solving mechanisms, and the great amount of free choice within structure inherent in the Pensacola project can be truly said to be organic, since each team grows as a closed system that is still bounded by a larger open system. At the sa
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