Background Information
People act as essential agents of organizational change at Sina Corporation in China. The acceptance of implementing this digital marketing platform in the region is taking the corporation to a couple of strides now and in the future. Notably, Sina Corporation stands to be an internet-based agency that takes the lead in China among digital marketing tools (Lian 2011, pp. 1300). It offers services such as access to emails, language web portals and value-added aspects for mobile telephone market. This organization is located in Shanghai, and its influential audience is the internet users in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It stands to the second internet-based agency across the global sphere. More importantly, the organization puts into operation four websites that are localized; which include sina.com.hk, sina.com.tw, sina.com and sina.com.cn.It targets a wide range of people in the market through the provision of online stores, and an array of information and news that satisfy the paramount interest of the people in the geography. The online services that are provided by the corporation include Sinasearch, online dating club, sinachat and sinababy. It has won to be the leading brand name in China because of its capabilities to attract 115 million users both at local and international grounds (Yu, Asur and Huberman 2012). It is also responsible for the creation of the window software in the Chinese interface. Its management posits that Sina stands to be an imperative Chinese language service provider. Its flourishment in the Chinese market emanates from the value-added services that it centres on as its focus to offer digital marketing tools and guidance to the users. These include essential short-messaging services, multi-media services, as well as wireless access protocols.
Wand Zhidong founded Sina Corporation through the merger with the US-based Sinanet agency. Employment opportunities cropped up because of the need to install a variety of tools to complete the service delivery objectives of the company. Among the employed personnel at Sina consist of software engineers who ensure that there is a correct interface between the users and the internet-based too that they are installing. The management is vital to offer supervisor services during the installation and implementation of the corporation’s plan. The business strategy of Sina reinforces by the rapid growth that is recorded in China. This greatly influences the dynamic in the digital marketing corporation hat looks to gain recognition in both local and global sphere (Lin 2020, pp. 910). To accrue large volumes of profits, Sina Corporation is taking advantage of the surge in the populations of people that use the internet and adoption of advertising tools in the business arena. The goals being pursued at Sina are customarily to change people’s attitudes to adopt the new tool in the marketing plan for bigger and smaller businesses. The paper, therefore, looks into analyzing the leadership, organization culture and change management processes and strategies at Sina Corporation.
Analysis and discussion
Change Management Strategies, Resistance Reduction and Processes at Sina
Evolution of the organizations is necessary because times are changing for digital marketing platforms. Sina Corporation understands that it should grow and survive to serve people for the longest time possible as it was well-known both locally and at the global geography (Schlæger and Jiang 2014, pp. 190). In this case, it needs to be open to changes that are relevant to the digital marketing aspects. The transition of Sina Corporation towards mobile advertising platform is a thrilling experience. With this change, the management is positive tat innovation, and empowerment of the task force will work best for the organization. It has to step up its game, especially in the management of its workforce toe sure success. To do so, it needs to come up with strategies and processes that target to reduce resistance from the employees or the customers, especially in this pandemic. The taskforce should be introduced to the adoption of big data analytics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities at the organization. Submitting Sina Corporation to change is indicative that it is ready to take an individual step towards enhancing sustainability, building the organizations brand and attracting more customers implementing change that targets the people will yield a substantive competitive advantage in the market place that Sina Corporation will enjoy and attain profitability. The principal objective of implementing changes in respect to the employees to aid the taskforce in embracing and acceptance of the dynamics in their future business environment.
An important strategy employed at Sina Corporation includes an assemblage of a digital workplace workforce. This indicates that the manual processes used in the company should be eliminated and the focus to be on implementing this change. The deliberated effort is needed to change Sina Corporation into a digital arena entirely. The people working in all levels in planning, execution, monitoring and controlling of digital policies and initiatives need to be subjected to a transformation to aid in the progress of the company. It targets inter-linking of the technology resources and process to welcome a new perception of the organization so that it gains recognition across the geographies and markets.
Sina Corporation is adapting to change in the management of its taskforce by taking it as their journey. They do not want to bother other organizations within China to bow down to their needs and support their intentions. It, therefore, needs to adopt the Chet Holmes model to implement the strategies and processes at the individual level in its taskforce (Ngai and Jin 2016, pp. 460). This is customarily based on the employee brainstorming and feedback in acceptance of change in the organization. The model puts the employees in a position to embrace the change through consultation and adoption of proper communication channels. This aids in efficient decision making and solution of the current problem facing Sina. For instance, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a significant change in the task force by driving business closures ad people losing their jobs (Duan, Liu and Wang 2020). In this case, Sina Corporation needs to communicate to its employees on the need to accept change so that they can enjoy the benefits that come alongside it. It is imperative to brainstorm the initiatives and policies with the entire team of employees and customers to get their taste. It is necessary to conceptualize solutions when adopting this model. This includes setting up a deadline and a small pilot study to ensure that the results are optimized. Training of staff to adopt and put the change to practice act as a fundamental aspect of this model as applied at Sina Corporation.
Leadership Processes at Sina
Being a digital marketing organization, Sina Corporation needs to have an efficient leadership team that will aid in the execution of strategies and initiatives that targets the changes imposed on the people. The leadership at Sina contains the board that has a mix of company knowledge and industry expertise. This helps a great deal in the delivery of value to the customers and the taskforce. The shareholders at Sina much enjoy the leadership experiences displayed by the board and overall taskforce. The capabilities of the Sina board to manage the investment and financial functions together with the governance experience make it to gain recognition at the global markets. Sina stands out to be a pivotal organization in china that has efficient leadership that undertakes sustainable operations with adequate financial grounds (Liu and Hu 2019, pp. 550). The administration in this corporation has taken the responsibility of coming up with strategic decisions that create oversight and account management as it executes Sina’s strategy.
Additionally, the current board has necessitated the launch and success of Weibo. The leadership here came up with a long-term vision and executed it to integrate Weibo into Sina fully. This is through the identification of crucial infrastructure that yielded to the outperformance and tremendous growth of this body that is being incubated into Sina by the leaders. In this regard, the board management is seen to comprise of the world-class individual who is aware of the current and emerging issues that can propel the company into greater heights. The leadership has the commitment and talent to oversee the implementation of operation and change management strategy at the corporation. Their unique experience to adapt to the rapidly changing and volatile internet business market is outstanding.
More unequivocally, the management at Sina stands out to be an excellent capital allocation body that builds on its leadership capabilities. The way Sina manages its balance sheet is pure as a result of adequate regulatory achievement and the discipline to make fair use of the available resources. The rigid board on the financial deliberations aids in the attainment of better outcomes and success in this digital marketing agency. In addition to this, Sina leadership has a vast experience of the Chinese market alongside the regulatory environment (Svensson 2014, pp. 170). Sina is lucky to have some of the directors in the leadership team with experience in the management and offering advice to the Chinese financing and M&A organizations which includes coverage of tax implications laws that ensures national security of the digital platforms.
The board is committed to drive value to Sina Corporation and satisfy the interest of the shareholders (Wang et al. 2020, pp. 106354). This builds confidence to the global partners, hence increasing the level of business relationships. This is the end objective of the corporation; to win its customers in the online platforms through adequate and quality service delivery. This can be reinforced through the adoption of Kotter’s model to guide Sina Corporation on the crucial steps to take in the leadership strategy.
Figure 2: Kotter’s eight transition steps model (Kotter 2012)
According to Kotter 2012, sustainable leadership yield better outcomes when it comes to change management. This model matches the Sina Corporation leadership model because it targets attainment of reproducible results through the establishment of the urge to attain success. This is because the corporation relies on innovative experiences from the leaders. The need to establish a powerful coalition between the employees, customers and the management is also an essential agent of leading change at Sina organization. The ideals behind the transformation of online services to accommodate mobile advertising processes are made necessary through putting forward of a vision. Communication through this vision is substantial to Sina digital marketing agency. More markedly, the need to empower the partakers of the corporation, such as the task force, is a pivotal leading experience that ought to be adopted by the Corporation. Deliberations and institutionalization of digital marketing approaches that sell the brand to the global populations are hence identified at Kotter’s model.
Organizational culture issues in Sina
Investing in quality leadership acts as a preamble of the success of Sina digital marketing agency. Adopting the culture that complies with the company’s vision serves as the basis for the execution of sustainable practices to yield a better outcome. The leaders at Sina Corporation are the lot that can be trusted and admired by the taskforce and even the customers from international backgrounds. The transparency in governance propagates a god brand name of the corporation, which consequently attracts digital marketing consumers from foreign countries. Besides, communication of a clear vision that targets transition to better mobile advertising agencies and coming up with a revolutionized workforce is a vital culture at Sina Corporation (Zhang and Negro 2013, pp. 199). This opens up doors for better execution of duties that earn transformation of the digital marketing tools in the global space.
The board, employees and the customers are bombarded with the need to uphold integrity at Sina agency. This starts from the transactions to the way relationships are built during the business activities execution (Feng 2017). Integrity in the organization serves as a value that nurtures success and allows the development of good rapport even to the unseen customers. Production of valuable and genuine results of the products in the sale is an essential virtue that yields to long-term propagation of relationships. Individual responsibilities are ascertained through a display of crucial virtues in the organization; this makes the leaders entrust their duties without fear of failure. The need to retain corporate citizenships in China makes the leadership team together with Sina’s workforce to display a culture that works on building on its image. No one wants to bring to a halt an enterprise that works for the benefit of its people in the long run. Since Sina is not dependent on the physical stores, construction of these buildings is minimized; hence environmental pollutions are regulated.
Integration of Weibo into Sina is a crucial way of approaching the business in the high-tech world (Benney 2013). Embracing the identity of the brand image together with its people is a good sign of an organizational culture that is manifested at Sina digital marketing agency. It’s the people’s responsibility to sell the company’s name; either through individual feedback responses or through the display of integrity values to the global partners. The reception of this online tool in the market is mostly developed on the production of its identity to the demographics that matter. Unity among the workforce acts a propellant of success at Sina Corporation. The management and the crew is united to ensure that they pool the resources to attain a common business objective. This is only possible when these groups share common principles and values to aid in abiding by the decisions made to ensure success within the organization.
The synergistic capabilities of the employees help in fighting against the risks that may result in the corporation’s management. The overall culture that drives business success at Sina Corporation is its ability to employ a sense of direction (Wang 2020, pp. 1051). It is an organization that has its laid down goals, belief and values that directs the employees on how to work. These aspects also cater to the leaders needs to manage the institution accordingly. The people working at the corporation can discern between what is right or wrong. As a consequence, a focused approach is nurtured, and productivity emanates from the imposition of quality resources and time.
Conclusions and Recommendations
To this end, Sina Corporation efficiently adapts to the change management, leadership and organizational culture to help it gain a competitive advantage over its competitors across the global sphere. The change primarily focuses on the people working in this organization; which comprises of the board, employees and the customers. Realization of a common goal is the main aim of the change management strategy. Transition to online mobile advertising through innovative approaches sells Sina to international consumers. The leadership with high experience in the management of innovative tools and possession of strong values to manage the Corporation is a milestone that is ultimately by the major stakeholders. The leadership that can build confidence and influence the foreigners to trade with Sina is a constructive entity to adopt. The organizational culture at Sina is also unique that enhances its brand name in both local and international geographies. The sense of direction that complies with the radical shifts of technological advancement is putting the operation in a better place.
However, there is a need to recommend critical change management, leadership and organizational culture strategies that can work best for Sina Corporation. Transformative leadership can be an adequate and quality tool to identify the dynamics ad creation of a vision to maintain the change. This will only be possible through offering financial incentives to the task force to reward them for the work that is well done. The incentives offered should be displayed to the public so that the other stakeholders can feel the impact and work harder towards the realization of the corporation’s goals. Nurturing a committed workforce will help in a significant transformation of online mobile advertising agency at Sina. Employing innovation and creativity in attending to the customers through the inclusion of video blogs and other pictorials can be an essential milestone set by the corporation. There is, therefore, the need to implement such dynamics to realize organizational objectives and productivity in the marketing fora.
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