LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR-MICROSOFT Essay

LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR-MICROSOFT - Essay Example ms Solutions Tod Nielsen, and Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold (Rosoff, Matt, Microsoft addresses employee morale, turnover, Direction on Microsoft, January 15, 2000). In 2005, cover story for Businessweek was: â€Å"Troubling Exits At Microsoft,† with a subtitle which captures the businessworld’s alarmed view of the events at Microsoft: â€Å"Once the dream workplace of tech’s highest achievers, it is suffering key defections to Google and elsewhere. What’s behind the losses?† (Businessweek, 26 September 2005). The same article writes about the bolting out of Microsoft by one of the top technical persons, Kai-Fu Lee, to join the company’s rival Google Inc., a move, which, according to Lee, rooted from what he saw as repeated missteps by the company, and even called the company incompetent, exactly opposite his picture of Google, which was encouraging bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down. Statistically, the situation is likewise alarming. Rosoff, in the same article, cites Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Robert Herbold who presented alarming statistics on employee attrition at the company’s last three Financial Analyst meetings, to wit: Since Fiscal Year (FY) 1995, attrition at Microsoft was between 7% and 8% ; and in FY 2000, it hit 9.6%, the first time it crested the 9% threshold since FY 1994. Although Microsoft’s is lower than the industry average attrition rate, it is going against the trend where the rest of the IT industry’s attrition significantly decrease. Rosoff also mentions that the Saratoga Institute research reveal that the median rate of voluntary employee separation in the IT industry dropped from 14.7% in 1997-1998, to 11.4% in 2000. Likewise, Hewitt Associates, a human resource consulting firm, pointed that attrition among IT professionals with highly marketable skills dropped from 16% in 1999 to 12% in 2000. As an Organizational Development Consultant, I have been tasked to assess the organization to find out the