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Organizations with values as their foundation have succeeded through the test of times at various periods of turbulence. The Tatas and the Birlas are few such business houses that have survived the testing times with continued growth and success. These business groups have created history by embarking on values. Values of integrity, commitment, passion, speed and seamlessness of Birla group that bind people together cover its diverse businesses. The values act as the bedrock for organizational thinking and processes, claims the website of an Aditya Birla group company. Personal values inherited by the heirs from the founder of Tata House, Sri Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, resulted in Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM). The 11 core values and concepts adopted by the Tatas in their TBEM—visionary leadership, customer driven excellence, organizational and personal learning, valuing employees and partners, agility, focus on the future, managing for innovation, management by fact, social responsibility and corporate citizenship, focus on results, and creating value and systems perspective—act as the basis for performance to all the Tata group companies. On the other hand, there have been organizations which failed to pay attention to the human and organizational values and hence could not withstand the test of long-term value creation for their stakeholders and had to tremble, disintegrate or vanish. There are plenty of examples for it. Once world renowned organization Arthur Andersen, the auditing firm, lost its core value of maintaining transparency with its stakeholders and fair dealings has ceased to exist. Anubhav Plantations Limited and many others in Indian context have fared no better when it came to compromising on core values. These examples substantiate that values help organizations to tackle the challenges of change and keep growing with the stability and continuous increase in productivity. The public sector firms are not an exception to the fact that the value foundation of the companies form the basis for their success. This study, therefore, analyzes the value system of a public sector company, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), using a descriptive case study method.
With a modest beginning in 1955, Oil and Gas Directorate, as ONGC was first called, with 60 employees resulted in the creation of Oil and Natural Gas Commission on the eve of Independence Day in 1956. It initially focused on the northeastern region for the oil reserves. At that time this region was considered to be not conducive for business. However, all such opinions were proven wrong because of the firm determination, courage, and conviction with which its founder, late Keshav Dev Malviya, took up the challenge of placing ONGC on the world map. Later in 1993, Oil and Natural Gas Commission was reorganized as Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited. From K D Malviya to the present day time the company was led by some of the best brains in the corporate world, and proud recipients of numerous national and international awards with a dedicated team of around 35,000 professionals and enjoys a formidable reputation in the global playing field, keeping pace with the front runner in the business, in the race for oil equity.
The statement of vision and mission adopted by the ONGC unleashes a strong value base existing in this great organization (Farooqi as cited by Pandey, 2004). It seeks to achieve world-class reputation by imbibing high standards of business ethics and organizational values, foster a culture of trust, openness, and mutuality to make working a stimulating and challenging experience to ONGCians. The company has a strong value of courage, patriotism, confidence and teamwork through which the organization could establish itself on a firm footing amidst the climate of total uncertainty and western view of absence of oil/gas in the country, except for in small parts of the North East sector.
By tracking critical periods of ONGC, history and stages of organization development, through changes that took place at various intervals of time established by the available research work, one can notice the strong base of organizational values reflected, nurtured and developed by the successive heads of this organization. |
