Organizational Change : Umpqua Bank Case Study - Essay Example

Challenges faced by the Umpqua's leadership in maintaining the culture: One of the biggest challenges the bank faced was the influence of the culture in the other acquired bank branches on the culture of Umpqua bank. Adoption of other banks involved retaining the banks’ employees. These employees had got used to a different culture and it was therefore a major challenge to make them adjust to a new culture smoothly. To overcome this problem, the leadership injected Umpqua’s culture into the other bank branches by bringing their employees in busloads to Umpqua's stores to offer them with orientation.

This enabled a real firsthand introduction to a new business world and which in turn made the employees feel the desire to change and hence adapt faster (Freeze, K., ND). It was a challenge for Umpqua to run its operations in a harmonious manner especially considering the fact that its individual stores were different in terms of size, demographics and layout. In addition, the branches were also different in the sense that their loan and deposit potential varied considerably. This therefore demanded individual stores to be handled differently.

The bank created a cross-functional task force to look for the best means by which the challenge could be overcome. The taskforce provided a strategic financial proposal which later streamlined its operations. Competition from other large banks posed a serious challenge to Umpqua's desire to succeed. Banks such as Washington Mutual and Bank of America sent the leadership of Umpqua bank to the drawing board to come up with new strategies that would aid in retaining its culture now that their competitors had started copying their already-in-use strategies.

In 2002, for example, Washington Mutual had its first ‘occassio’ branch opened whereas the Bank of America started holding experiments to ascertain the effectiveness of the branch design. To counter this, the leadership at Umpqua decided to invest in the best customer service delivery as compared to their competitors. Umpqua's customer service, especially its in-store customer service which was unique, was its competitive edge and so it had to be perfected (Freeze, K., ND). Umpqua bank with the aim of remaining the leader in the banking business settled on a plan to train and retrain its employees to ensure high standards of customer service.

Hiring of new qualified employees was effected as a measure to arm the bank with enough manpower. The bank’s newly hired employees were trained in new and more efficient ways of dealing with customers and were tasked to put them in use while serving their customers. The future impact of Mergers and acquisitions Mergers and acquisition result in large banks gobbling up small banks in the process of creating networks both nationally and regionally. This will continuously lead to the increase in the number of the community banks.

However this increase can also be caused by or realized if large community banks acquire small community banks and if small community banks continue to merge with each other. Continued merging and acquisition therefore, could lead to a situation where the resultant large banks start suppressing the small banks and even in worse case scenarios pushing them out of the market. This could lead to a banking business less considerate to customers with low income in a given region (Young, 2002). Mergers and acqui