Introduction
The purpose of this report is to discuss two main leadership and management issues that exist within Tencent, which is currently a technology giant in China. The two challenges analyzed are managing disputes and managing changes. In some cases, causes are pointed out along with the effects on Tencent that it was faced with, as well as ways in which the challenge could have been dealt with better. Relevant theories are essential in order to reach the level of requirements for postgraduate studies. Tencent has been exposed to extensive leadership and management difficulties in keeping performance rates at levels unattainable or otherwise amidst unremitting growth and volatility. Being China’s tech leader in an increasingly global, fast-changing internet sector, Tencent should focus on building a culture where people embrace change enthusiastically across all the internet verticals. However, narrowing down disagreements and risk engagement, which is the background of continuous advancement, is a never-ending story not even the innovative and visual founder like Ma Huateng achieves. In this blog, I highlight the two continuous problems that are bent towards disruption of harmony and agility – persistent conflicts within teams and ineffective handling of organizational change. The implementation of Rahim’s integrative conflict management system and Lewin’s change model using scientific solutions would provide evidence for Tencent to get rid of these problems. This article constitutively analyzes how the philosophy of the Chinese is grappled with due to the expansion of trade and international relations, which necessitate harmonization of the Eastern and Western norms of relationships. With the ongoing acceleration of various new technologies, as well as the new generations, the report gives key steps for Tencent to remain unified, pioneering, and have direction in the period that makes eternal changes.
Overview of Tencent
Established in 1998, Tencent is a corporate conglomerate in China whose fields of work span internet services, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other technologies. Tencent controls the largest social networks, as well as payment platforms in the country, the likes of WeChat, QQ, and the video game industry through Tencent Games and other services. What we are dealing with here is one of the largest IT corporations worldwide, including over 83,000 staff, and named a US$470 billion market capitalization by the end of 2022 (Tencent, 2023).
Since the early days when Tencent was just a Shenzhen startup company, it has blossomed into a global giant. The corporation has led an Internet Revolution in China, and the way Chinese Internet users interact and spend their lives online is the result of this revolution. In addition to its nationwide growth, Tencent is determined to seek a world-class achievement by extending its international presence into the fields of content, entertainment, and business services. Despite the fact that I am in a ‘weigh-in’ with Amazon, Meta, and Google, it stands out as an incredible success. These huge companies are working, but I was not lucky enough to see the roadmap or precedents when Qzone and QQ messenger were launched more than 20 years ago.
Nevertheless, the journey of bringing together a continuously superior quality from the areas of finance, healthcare, education, and transportation to a large complex for the managers and the leaders is a hardship. Though it is about having a decentralized but entrepreneurial culture, office procedures, and systems structures are imperative when more than 80,000 people are worldwide employees of a single firm. Nevertheless, officials, despite even the best vision and infrastructure, still have to be efficient with their political and bureaucratic hurdles in mind in order to remain fast and creative. Such a background illustrates that the ability to maintain peace and control the frequent changes rooted there are inseparable from each other regardless of the superpowers contending amongst each other.
Vision and Mission Statement
Tencent’s mission is “to enhance people’s quality of life through internet services.” Its vision is “to become the most respected internet company” (Tencent, 2023).
Challenge 1: Managing Conflicts
Key Issues
Various conflict issues manifest within Tencent due to its size, matrix structure, high-pressure working environment, and international workforce: Various conflict issues manifest within Tencent due to size, matrix structure, high-pressure working environment, and international workforce:
- Bureaucratic conflicts and potential strains result from matrix structures that are horizontally divided into departments. It gives the project leader a chance to split the manager into divisions, causing coordination issues (Smith, 2022).
- The problem of global cultural collisions. People who are from different cultures use diverse working styles and have differences in values, which often cause miscommunications (Zhang, 2021).
- Overwork led by drawing extreme hours of work sees teams lose harmony. Considerable time (50-60+ hour work weeks) is typical within gaming/technical teams, so as an effect, stress is on the rise, and interpersonal relations are strained.
Impact on the Organization
Unresolved organizational conflicts hinder organizational performance by making employees less productive and more absent and replacing motivated employees with apathetic ones (THE ABSENTEE ZONE and MILLION DOLLAR THRESHOLD) (Nur et al., 2010). For Tencent, conflict can:
- Derail new product releases and big project benchmarks.
- A competitive lever that may cause employee resignation and burnout while the new issues might be getting mileage outside.
- Destroy cross-department inter-cooperation that will be key in the innovation area. Use our AI to write for you by clicking on the “Write for me” button. Write the given sentence in your words: The role of women in society has continued to evolve as their contributions become more widely recognized and as societies strive to achieve gender equality.
A conflict leads to a disruption of the processes, which in turn brings down the number of products produced. Rahim (2010) came up with employee conflicts being 21% of management’s time used in dispute resolution rather than in productive and effective work. Emerging technology can quickly cause an unseen impact on the company’s struggles and threaten its present competitive edge. Therefore, managing a possibly contradictory negotiation process with combined harmony principles will be orchestrated purposely to level the height of escalation and for a sustained cooperation culture (Chen & Tjosvold, 2006).
Avoidance/Management of the Challenge
Tencent can apply Rahim’s (2010) meta-model for effectively managing organizational conflicts: Tencent can apply Rahim’s (2010) meta-model for effectively managing organizational conflicts:
- To achieve that integration, we must learn to come up with solutions that all of us can agree upon. There should be communication between the parties, which will lead to a win-win situation.
- Splendid – Enjoys keeping others’ problems at heart rather than one’s issues (low issue for Self, deep concern for others).
- Aggressive – Badgering and trying to have someone do what they want without considering their views. (High concern with Self, low concern with others).
- Removal to take place is the keeping off of situations that are difficult (not caring for Self or others).
- Compromising – the efforts to solve disagreements through concessions go upper and meet in the middle (moderately concerned with Self and others).
Tencent would often prefer to settle the issues by jointly employing strategies through a cooperative integrating mode rather than choosing a competitive, zero-sum approach – Chinese-style harmony (Chen & Tjosvold, 2006). However, to say the same thing, leaders should employ alternative approaches that may work fast in settling disputes without too much escalation. Always remember that lying is the only viable option for the product pioneer around the globe; it is easy to develop the following idea: cultural differences might behave either as appealing and duty-bound or as overcoming adherence to their own rules, especially when it is critically important, to be command-driven and to make quick decisions during product launches.
Consequently, Rahim’s model also complies with Lewin’s change theory, where demolition of the old mindsets/dynamics is normally required to set him on the right track. As a consequence, the power of rethinking the issues in the atmosphere must be achieved by open communication and empathy (Hussain et al., 2018). Team conflicts can be minimized through withdrawal or extra care for the sake of team integrity and consistency with Tencent’s goals.
Challenge 2: Managing Change
Key Issues
One would require a constant management approach by Tencent to handle the change rather than an intermittent approach with a pre-defined time spell. Key change triggers include:
- Those paradigm shifts such as internet ways and technologies include Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, and brand new internet paradigm shifts.
- Forcing Chinese shoppers to update their products and services to meet the growing needs of more sophisticated customers spread across lower-tier cities and middle-aged and elderly populations (Yip,2022)
- Strategic or tactical reshaping to stay competitive in the international arena and penetration into areas such as world content, social media, and finance (Tencent, 2023).
Change is a permanent phenomenon, and employees hope to learn and adapt to it because of the uncertainty and stress caused by this situation.
Impact on the Organization
Ineffectively managing change can substantially impact Tencent through Ineffectively managing change can substantially impact Tencent through:
- Coming late to the party – forgetting technology rivals the rest of the world.
- There is a reduction in productivity and effectiveness as a result of the unrest and insecurity when changes are being made.
- Falling behind local growth trends and those overseas because of not adjusting the services in accordance with customer needs.
Tencent needs to acknowledge the nature of the web and the rising technology and, therefore, needs to be quick and flexible when responding to changes in the market. Slow and unbending to the shifts in the market can quickly destroy the advantage the corporation has built up. Smollan’s (2022) investigation of organizational change reveals that people have hardship handling any reduction in emotional well-being through uncertainty, stress, and disengagement. This, in turn, puts agility, culture, and performance on thin ice.
Avoidance/Management of the Challenge
Lewin’s three-step model remains hugely influential in implementing successful and sustainable change (Appelbaum et al., 2012): Lewin’s three-step model remains hugely influential in implementing successful and sustainable change (Appelbaum et al., 2012):
- Unfreeze – The establishment of continuing talks about impending changes aimed at convincing staff why the changes should be implemented.
- Change – Having permissions and the support of the employees to prepare, train, and give resources to accept the change. Team members need to be included to ensure commitment.
- Reinforce – Forcing the change to be an eternal habit by means of policies, structures, and culture.
This supports the transition journey of Tencent, where new projects start building a reason for agreement, which works first via the right communication to get the buy-in (Yip, 2022). The leaders provide these teams with the necessary support during the chaotic transition environment, which includes keeping valued personnel while adjusting existing practices and systems (Tencent, 2020).
Facilitating two-way communication between impacted employees and high management would create a psychosocial support group early on and, in doing so, would make handling the new normal much easier for those involved, according to Hussain et al. (2019). This eliminates the perceived threat as something that is worrying. The transparency, empathy, and emotional and instrumental support that Tencent leaders would need in order to be able continuously to adapt in a turbulent industry where changes occur is thus very self-evident; in plain terms – the leaders of this company need to stick to the following principles (Smollan, 2022).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the leaders will constantly face team conflicts, management, and continuous changes, which are challenges that the tech industry disruptors cannot sidestep, and Tencent is one of them. Disputes, if left unsolved, can ruin product release plans; on the other hand, tearing apart the organization can lead to talent attrition, with the strengths and creativity of organizational people becoming useless and is very harmful to the richness and competitiveness of organizations. The application of effective and evidence-based organizational behavior approaches such as openness, integration for problems, and conflict-making change with an engagement model will orientate Tencent to respond strategically. In a nutshell, the above discussion indicates that Tencent must keep refining the soft skills inherent in managing the versatile and robust teams that thrive in turbulent times. On the one hand, the founders continue guiding, while on the other hand, the managers earnestly require problem resolution during the formation stage so as to prevent camaraderie and performance from being destroyed. Likewise, being open to opposition, duality, and commitment through succeeding challenges stops change as complex and unsuccessful as with old rival Yahoo. Finally, during the upcoming decades, the tranquil fight of Tencent against global titans will be based on how the company does not lose but maintains the organic aspect of human affairs that, being ironic, they would like to destroy within such a disruptive setting. Cultural issues triggered by scale might turn into political concerns and consequently endanger peace. However, with humanist principles in mind as a compass, Tencent can be the leader of the future, both for-profit and for a good cause. By being able to ensure harmony among teams and innovations, Tencent’s corporate culture will remain intact, and its leadership status will still be the same regardless of whether technological shifts and the growth of Chinese technology have caused internet ecosystems to transform rapidly. Another video supplements all of this by looking into it in greater depth and can be accessed on it. [YouTube Video Link]
References
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