Introduction:
Organizational or company culture is the primary root of determining the happiness and satisfaction of the respective company. As an indicator of judging the productivity and efficiency of the company, the agile company culture is an essential pillar in modern times. The company under consideration is Spotify, with a particular emphasis on agile company culture. The app provides free music around the globe after creating a user account and charges for the upgradation of respective accounts (Malmcrona et al., 2018). For Spotify’s better efficiency, its culture matters a lot, especially the company’s mission, beliefs and values concerning its employees. The thriving culture of any company decides the productivity profile based on its employees’ zealous gratification and commitment. This paper will explore the agile culture of Spotify Company under the guiding shadows of seven critical dimensions of culture concerning creativity, aggressiveness, detail orientation, people-oriented, outcome-presenter, stability stance, and teamwork features.
Seven Critical Dimensions of Organizational Culture:
The organizational theory provides the significant concept of organizational culture emerging from the value patterns of the respective company. Such a culture impacts all areas within an organization, including leadership patterns, decision-making power, the relation among colleagues, the satisfaction of customers, dealing with suppliers and communication channels. In this context, the organizational culture profile (OCP) developed by O’Reilly’s team provides a sound basis for such an expression. These seven key dimensions may include innovative opportunities, detailed orientation, aggressiveness, stability, outcome-focused, people-oriented and team-focused or team-oriented. These elements determine the productivity and progress of any company (Pallathadka, 2020).
Spotify’s Agile Culture:
The agile culture of Spotify goes with the combinations of two very different dimensions, i.e., product and geographical features. It is because Spotify is currently based in more than thirty countries around the globe. However, following the basic organizational structure, Spotify performs brilliantly concerning the organizational cultural profile. In this context, it is known as a comprehensively detailed-oriented company. The company releases multiple updates throughout the year by producing numerous feature squads. Such a squad rigorously works only on search tabs in the application and provides detailed catalogues according to research-based data. Besides detailed orientation, Spotify also captures a high domain in the innovation dimension. The company allows employees a colossal paradigm of creativity and experimentation for better results. In this context, the company has acquired the services of thousands of employees since its establishment. According to research sources,
“Spotify made many of these practices optional and decided agile practices were more important than standardization (Moe et al., 2021).”
Similarly, another agile practice is the aggressiveness of Spotify to promote new updates in competition with Google music and Apple music in the market. To optimize company culture and make it more efficient, they have prevailed in autonomous rule in the company where instead of managerial slots, squads make decisions. So, without waiting for the manager’s decisions, the squad team works quickly, and the available time is used to compete in the market. Meanwhile, Spotify has been outcome-oriented as the founder, Daniel, has established that employees go through mistakes, have experiments and learn from them quickly (Mankins & Garton, 2017).
Moreover, Spotify does not incline to a stable cultural aspect in the company as the phenomenon continues to work on tasks with solid preferences. Hence, a cross-pollination method is adopted instead of a standardized scheme of accomplishing tasks. The main reason for such agile culture is the autonomous behaviour of workers. In a similar decision-making context by the squad team, Spotify also proves itself a people-oriented company by enhancing its employee’s decision power. All the employees work with mutual respect, praise the working achievements of each other, and encourage the performance potential of each person (Mumen, 2020). Spotify has relinquished the ego stance of employees in the vicinity of the company by promoting cooperation and teamwork. In addition, massive employees intermingle and adopt each other’s good habits. As many new employees have no experience performing tasks in an autonomous environment, the agile culture eagerly persuades old employees voluntarily help the new employees’ slots.
Furthermore, Spotify poses a servant-leaders environment instead of master based space adorned with authority. In this way, the company has created a team-oriented environment responsible for a multifaceted productive atmosphere. The required tasks are shared among squad team members who take them as project missions and tend to achieve the goals in collaborative norms. To achieve the missions, the employees have optimized coordination work circumstances. For example, the premises are bound by whiteboard walls, and employees can jot down their respective notes. Hence, everyone can see and bounce back with their additional ideas and rectify mistakes (Breyter, 2022).
Conclusion:
From the above discussion, it can be inferred that Spotify’s organizational agile culture is fantastic. It covers substantial geographical and cultural diversity spread among many countries. Spotify works in such a manner to ensure a happy, safe and satisfied ecosystem above the board. The employees cherish innovative opportunities in alliance with rigorous experimentation in an outcome-oriented atmosphere. Further, the Spotify culture is autonomous, providing a people-oriented environment with many eagerly working employees. The company promotes its product and competes with its competitors in the market in an aggressive manner. Being detailed-oriented, Spotify also presents a people-oriented ecosystem where the managerial role is neglected and decision power vests with squad members. The cultural norms, values and systems are so adorned with the goal and mission-oriented space that they have captured and attracted magnificent talent around the globe. In this way, Spotify has led the app worldwide with zealous success, where great agile culture presents an efficient working environment for employees with their help.
References
Breyter, M. (2022). Scaling Agile Delivery. In Agile Product and Project Management (pp. 235-261). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
Malmcrona, A., Andersson, M., & Miltersen, K. (2018). Real Option Valuation of High Growth Tech Firms.
Mankins, M., & Garton, E. (2017). How Spotify balances employee autonomy and accountability. Harvard business review, 95(1).
Moe, N. B., Šmite, D., Paasivaara, M., & Lassenius, C. (2021). Finding the sweet spot for organizational control and team autonomy in large-scale agile software development. Empirical Software Engineering, 26(5), 1-41.
Mumen, A. A. (2020). Transforming into an agile organization.
Pallathadka, H. (2020). Influence Of Organizational Culture On Employee Behavior. European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine, 7(10), 2020.
