You are a veteran HR professional at a regionally owned mining operation. Your company has won numerous awards for safety, organizational culture, and productivity and you personally have a great reputation for helping to build capacity through progressive services and programs.

The company began in a small northern Quebec community of 1,000 people and has grown to include four mine sites. The success of the firm placed it in a position of being a target for acquisition and was recently purchased by a large Canadian-owned company that is profitable, but without a great reputation for employee satisfaction or safety culture. These new acquisitions now have the company positioned for growth, but the new owners want to take the opportunity to learn from your company and drive cultural change through a reorganization. The acquisition brought existing companies, their brand, culture, product line and workforce together.

Your Role:

You have been assigned to lead the merger and new structure development, a daunting but exciting task. You have been directed to create something brand-new that will unstick behaviour, effect change, and then cement the culture in place. Some key elements of the company values are to be retained, including a drive towards being profitable, but while you improve overall culture and safety performance. The challenge is to create one corporate organizational structure to support the adoption of shared values and targets across the whole group of companies.

Step 1: The Deliverables in this Assignment

Your role is to design an organizational structure for the amalgamated company in chart (suggested 2 pages for clarity - this can be created directly in WORD or imported from a program such as Visio), supported by a solid rationale for your structure, outlining how it will support a new path and direction for the organization. Remember, you are the newcomer to the head office, and will have to rely on the validity of your structure to unstick behaviour and win over supporters. Begin by defining the organizational hierarchy, outlining each role and why you chose to create it.

In one or two lines, describe the core function of each role and how it will positively push towards change, or how it will cement certain activities and behaviours that you want to retain. Outline how you would advise the CEO to roll out the new structure, with time frames, who would you put into place at each of the mine sites, and in what order. You get to create the conditions for change so be bold. If there is information that you require that is not noted in the scenario just make your own assumptions but ensure to note them in your assignment.

As this is a cumulative assignment, make sure to use concepts and models that you have learned in previous modules. Communication concepts and models would fit well into your strategy, as would motivation models and perhaps conflict and perception. When describing the roles within the new organization your focus should be on the way that the roles will influence change---in other words, don't focus on the operational roles as much as how the position will specifically take on the task of influencing change.