Designing cultural change at a leading Italian multinational company in the furniture industry

The paper aims at exploring the process through which revisiting corporate values and culture can constitute a sound basis for designing an effective organizational change process. It is based on a qualitative research conducted at a leading Italian multinational company in the furniture industry which was facing many challenges: decreasing demand, internationalization of manufacturing process, increasing competition from emerging countries and employee redundancy. In order to face this turmoil, the company decided to revisit its corporate values/management style as the starting point for leading an organizational change. The research adopted a cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on organizational and communication theoretical backgrounds. It assessed the alignment between the corporate values desired by the CEO and its family – the majority shareholders – and the ones spread among senior/middle managers and employees. It was carried out an ethnographically oriented case study: analysis of official corporate documents; 32 interviews to the CEO, other majority shareholders, senior/middle managers; 4 focus groups involving 45 employees from all corporate areas. Starting from the evidences collected on the filed, the paper tries to address the following theoretical and managerial issues: - how is it possible to identify and to integrate “different cultural identities” during organizational change? - to what extent a “bottom up” approach might favour the overcoming of resistances to cultural change? - which is the role of internal communication in supporting people involvement in the change process? - in which way the deployment of new corporate values/style of management can be practically supported through communication, training and HRM?