Cass Business School Explores Barclays’ Reputational Problems

LONDON - April 9, 2013 - PRLog -- Commenting on the Salz review into Barclays’ reputational problems, Cass Business School Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Andre Spicer, says:

“Underlying Salzs’ recommendations there seems to be a suggestion of a profound change. It involves a shift from a high risk, high rewards culture, towards a much more staid model based on prudence and professionalism. Furthermore, there is a recognition that banks need to focus not only on technical issues, such as credit and market risk, but also softer issues such as leadership, conduct and reputation.

“The review recommends building a more coherent and cohesive culture across the group, giving further strength to the HR function, changes to corporate governance, and changes to bonuses. Some of these reforms, such as changes to pay structures or corporate governance, will be relatively easy to put in place.

“What will be much more difficult is the culture change program. Changing corporate culture is difficult and it takes time. Integrating a corporate culture in such a diverse organization is even harder. Indeed, many culture change programmes tend to just produce surface compliance among some and deep cynicism among others.

“One surprising detail in the report is the apparent unwillingness of junior staff to escalating problems to senior managers. There seemed to be a common assumption that senior staff don’t want to know about problems. This resulted in an upwards ignorance management on the part of junior staff who were careful to protect their seniors from potentially negative information.

“Moving beyond surface level change will require a longer term commitment on the part of senior management.”

Professor Spicer is part of the Cass Business School Management Faculty (http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/research-and-faculty/faculties...).  As a Professor of Organisational Behaviour, he is well placed to comment on the management of large institutions.

Cass Business School is ideally placed to produce top quality senior management professionals, working with executives in the global business community through their Executive MBA (http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/courses/mba/executive-mba) and Executive Education programmes.  If you would be interested in learning at a leading business school in the UK, then contact Cass Business School.