assignment 3 nokia

Running head: NOKIA TECHNOLOGY COMPANY 1

NOKIA TECHNOLOGY COMPANY 5

Nokia Technology Company

Student's Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course Title

Date

Nokia Technology Company

Although Nokia is considered one of the pioneers and leaders of the mobile manufacturing industry, it has undergone various phases to lose its market position. The company's decision to sell its mobile manufacturing section to Microsoft and the presence of leaders who are not innovative led to the slowed progress and performance of the company. Although Nokia went back to the mobile manufacturing industry, it still struggles to compete with well-established companies like Apple, Samsung, and Huawei. The analysis of Nokia's organizational design and structure and the description and discussion of its challenges will go a long way in identifying the solutions that can be adopted to get the company back on track.

Nokia's Organizational Design

Nokia's success in the last few decades was achieved due to its effective organizational design and structure. Juha-Antti Lamberg (2019) observes that Nokia uses a horizontal or flat organizational structure that is more effective in decision-making and the elimination of barriers created by bureaucracy. The Horizontal structure at Nokia eliminates the hierarchical layers that usually present challenges such as poor communication flow and a lack of collaboration among employees (Juha-Antti Lamberg, 2019). The chains of command at Nokia are not more than three, meaning that the top management can easily communicate and maintain touch with other employees. Nokia's organizational structure is only made up of the top leadership, followed by managers and other employees. Nokia adopted the flat organizational structure because it wanted to give employees more power and autonomy to be innovative and develop localized solutions to their problems (Wang, Hedman, & Tuunainen, 2016). The adoption of the flat organizational structure has presented Nokia with several advantages. Foremost, the adoption of a horizontal organizational structure has helped Nokia to maintain employee autonomy. Over the years, Nokia employees enjoyed freedom and control, allowing them to specialize in certain areas. Another advantage of the horizontal structure used by Nokia is that it provides the optimum use of resources. The fact that there are a few layers of hierarchy means that the company spends less on labor costs. In 2020, the company reduced its executive and still managed to function optimally (Wang et al., 2019). From the analysis, it is evident that the adoption of a horizontal structure has effectively ensured that Nokia maintains its position as one of the leading technology companies in the world.

The Challenge Facing Nokia

Despite its recent resurgence and relative improvement in performance, Nokia still faces several challenges that must be addressed for it to compete with other companies. Juha-Antti Lamberg (2019) states that poor leadership is the main factor that made Nokia lose its market position. Initially, Nokia had young and innovative leaders who were not afraid of taking risks. The leaders inspired creativity among employees, helping Nokia to come up with new and innovative ideas regularly. For example, Nokia revolutionized the mobile manufacturing sector by creating its first smartphone (Wang et al., 2016). As the company grew, it started onboarding leaders who were more concerned about performance. The leaders did not inspire innovation and instead demanded creativity and innovation within strict deadlines. Employees were given pressure and a strict deadline to develop innovative ideas, which discouraged most of them. The desire to grow at a much faster rate saw the company create more departments, ending with a bloated workforce (Juha-Antti Lamberg, 2019). Declining profits and a bloated workforce served as ticking time bombs which eventually exploded in 2019 and 2020 when the company laid off approximately 6.45 of its workforce.

Nokia should, therefore, look at its organizational structure and its current challenges and look for a way to address them. Identifying the right strategies can go a long way in ensuring that the company regains its position among the most valuable and profitable technology companies in the world.

References

Juha-Antti Lamberg. (2019). Ringtone: Exploring the rise and fall of Nokia in mobile phones. Journal of International Business Studies, 50(2), 292-294. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41267-018-0188-y

Wang, J., Hedman, J., & Tuunainen, V. K. (2016). Path creation, path dependence and breaking away from the path: Re-examining the case of Nokia. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, 11(2), 16-27. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-18762016000200003