Las competencias peculiares del Justicia de

It is a well-known fact, that employees who are satisfied with their work environment are more motivated and achieve better results. I use the company Wilkhahn as a best practice example to illustrate that the value system of the leader is crucial to shape the work place experiences of the employees.

Respect, fairness, trust and responsibility characterize a good collaboration and work-atmosphere. The company Wilkhahn is well known for their social engagement and for their great respect towards employees. The special relation between the employees and the company stems from the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century when the company was rebuilt. The leadership principle is based on the personal beliefs of the former president and owner Fritz Hahne: “No order without explanation”. After he introduced co-operative leadership in the sixties a participation model was established. The employees are ‘silent’ shareholders and share 50% of the profit. Three decades later the model was actualized as to changes in internal structures and compensation development.

Following the market development in the nineties Wilkhahn was looking for a new organization structure to allow the employees to apply their skills and talents directly to the work process. The president of the company was clear about the fact that his employees were able to build their own house, to arrange their personal finances, to take care of their family and to educate their children. He concluded: Why should these people not be able to arrange their work at Wilkhahn company. Wilkhahn introduced autonomous working groups as a pilot project and under the supervision of a psychologist. The evaluation of the project was promising: employees were more satisfied with their work; the rate of illness decreased as well as the rate of failures and the amount of days employees did not show up was less. Today the employees enjoy a lot of freedom and share responsibility. The working groups receive an order and a dead-line. How they organize the work, who does what and when is completely up to them. What counts is that high quality production is delivered in time. The employees can work between 6.00 a.m. and 10.00 p.m.; they can work 100 hours in advance and their work time can be 50 hours behind schedule. The change turned out to be an improvement for both sides. Since then

employees have been more often rewarded for proposals to improve processes and production and participate actively in maintaining and developing the corporate culture. Today, work at Wilkhahn is completely organized in groups and project teams. The organizational structure has been reduced to two hierarchy levels and Wilkhahn sees itself as an living company in which the employees act as entrepreneurs.(25)

Just like other companies Wilkhahn has had good times and bad times. Until now the company has survived all crises whereas many other companies in the same sector of business do no longer exist - they are either bankrupt or were bought by a global company. The study of the British Design Council on the top 100 public companies concluded that all companies follow the ups and downs of the market but the level differs. Referring the results of the study to the SMEs leads to the assumption that design-minded companies follow the ups and downs on a higher level and therefore have better chances to survive in tough times.

Wilkhahn was always aware of the fact that the design of the physical work environment influences the well-being of the employees and sets visual statements. The production-halls have been built in different decades. Each is a witness to history and represents the technology and the style of the period it was build. Architecture is seen as an important part of the corporate culture. Wilkhahn contracted renowned architects to design the buildings, which were awarded with several architecture prizes.

The organization structure of Wilkhahn consists of a number of self-organizing units, which build the company altogether. As in systems-theory the whole is more than the addition of the particles. This kind of structure is comparable to the biological organization structures to be found in nature. The biological organization- structures have proved their functionality for billions of years and are to a great extent resistant to failures. They can cope with environmental or natural disasters to a large extent. It seems plausible to learn from nature in order to create sustainable organization structures for business. The complexity of new challenges is growing in all companies and requires appropriate handling. Fredmund Malik from St. Gallen University states that the logic of success depends on the

consideration of complexity and he concludes that the handling of complexity needs new organizational structures, namely structures that organize themselves. (26) A lot of research is already done in the sector of technology - bionic - to benefit from natural principles (27), it is worthwhile to think about the investigation of natural organization structures - biologic.