After reading a lot of different articles, it came to my understanding there were numerous organizational behavior issues present at Uber. Susan Fowler, a former female engineer at Uber, describes her experiences working at Uber in her blog post “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber”.

(Image Source: Susan Fowler)

After reading Susan Fowler’s blog post, it was very evident that Uber’s workplace environment was far from safe and professional. She retells her story of being sexually harassed in the workplace along side many other women; she and the other women reported cases of sexual harassment to the human resources department numerous times, however most of them were ignored as the perpetrator was a “high performer”. She also describes incidents where every manager fought with their peers and tried to undermine their direct supervisor to take their direct supervisor’s role and instances were directors would withhold business-critical information from one of the executives to curry favor with a different executive.

(Image Source)

From what I’ve read from articles and Fowler’s blog post, it seems that the organizational culture at Uber ignores unethical issues and sometimes encourages unethical attitudes to make the workplace a hostile environment. The chain of command is disregarded and orders from an authoritative figure are very often disobeyed, as everyone within the firm seems to be working against each other and undermining each other in an attempt to climb the corporate ladder. As a result, this became Uber’s dominant culture and because of their culture, projects were being abandoned and nobody knew what the organization’s priorities were. Employees would be fired if they couldn’t find another project to work on, thus forcing them to take a part in the political games to stay employed.

I believe Uber’s toxic organizational culture is the reason many executives are leaving the firm and it is inline with Jeff Jones’, now the former president of Uber, statement, “The beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber”.  If Uber fails to resolve their toxic organizational culture, I am convinced that it will continue to plague the company’s operations and we will see many more executives leave Uber.

I would highly recommend everyone who has time, to read Susan Fowler’s blog post about the disgusting and unethical practices that are happening at Uber.

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Sources :

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/business/jeff-jones-leaves-uber-ride-sharing-president.html 

https://www.recode.net/2017/2/20/14666572/uber-sexism-susan-fowler-delete-uber

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber

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