In recent years, Vietnams economy has quickly developed and integrated

successfully into global business.

In November 2006, Vietnam officially became a member of World Trade
Organization (WTO). This may lead to significantly positive changes to this
country, but it may also make many challenges. For example:
unemployment, take over, competition, dependency or to lag far behind
other countries.
For those reasons, each domestic entity is required to rapidly innovate
organizational structure and method of operation in order to adapt to more
severely competitive business environment and moreover extend scope of
activities worldwide. It aims to reduce bad impact and catch good
opportunities originated from globalization.
However, after 2 decades of innovation, many organizations in Vietnam on
all fields are managed and ruined under bureaucracy, especially state-owned
enterprises.Therefore there is an issue which should be discussed that
specify causes and propose solutions in order to come to wipe old vestige
and create new structures and institutions. This aims to build an dynamic
business environment and help each person to promote the whole ability, to
contribute to socio-economic development in a new era. So, senior members
of the Vietnamese government and top business leaders also have repeatedly
publicly stated that Vietnamese organizations must improve significantly to
compete internationally. This has now become urgent because of
Vietnam's becoming a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Experts state that there are two areas in particular which must be addressed:
Bureaucracy must be dramatically reduced.
Individuals must be more pro-active. They must show initiative, make
decisions and implement them
PART I :Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are
widespread in Vietnam (especially in state owned
ENTERPRISES)
1.1. Real situation of bureaucracy and non-proactive in Vietnam
The bureaucracy and non-proactive in Vietnam reflects clearly in state
owned enterprises (most in structure and people) where:
The input and output of state owned companies in Vietnam are set from top
down, each state owned enterprise is a party who performs a specific
function assigned by the state. Vertical structure is still widely applied.
Power distance is still strong as most junior employees think that seniors
have a lot of experience about work and they know all the things so there is

no way or chance to change. Ascription is overwhelming, people are

evaluated by their working years not on actual results.
1.2. Why bureaucracy and non-proactive are widespread in Vietnam
(especially in state owned enterprises)
Through many studies, there are a lot of reasons but some of them are
overwhelming: (structure, context, environment, commitment, perception,
attitude)
Most of state owned enterprises are structured with functional orientation
(vertical designs): each individual has his/her own job and only focus of that.
The word complete means that he/she completes one part, that individual
is not taught or trained to be responsible for the whole job.
Their perception is affected mostly by their colleagues that the managers,
supervisors are always correct and right because they have plentiful of
experience of the job.
Individual only concentrates on the job assigned and not concerns about
customers satisfaction, final result of the team work.
Definition of team work is to group in a team but work individually, in
another words, it can be said individualism in collectivism, individual
wants feedback about their own performance as a member of a team first and
then for the whole team.
Culture of information sharing is weak in Vietnam especially in state
owned enterprises where the person who has information is the one who has
advantage. So if they have information, experience or valuable lessons, they
keep for their own. Information is considered as tangible asset and if
someone else know, that means you lose.
Speaking up capacity of employees is quite little, people have ideas,
however, they look at the example of precedents (that a lot of people with
idea speaking up are sacked or rejected). State owned enterprises which
depend mostly on state budget are not usually willing to take risks from new
idea reality.
The ideas which are carried out in reality are the ones that come from the
top of the companies (board of managers) who stayed far from the real
situation.
PART II - SOLUTIONS TO REDUCING BUREAUCRACY AND
MAKING
PEOPLE BECOME MORE PROACTIVE IN VIETNAMESE
ORGANIZATION
2.1. Why do we have to change

Why we need to change our organization, to reduce bureaucracy and to

encourage employees especially managers to be more proactive?
Vietnamese students have done very well in international competitions and
brought home a lot of prizes and medals but the competitiveness of
Vietnamese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) is decreasing, SOEs are
loosing in international market and even in domestic one, the growth rate is
rather low compared to the private and foreign sector although they get a lot
of subsidies and privileges from the government. The cause of the problem
here is not the ability of the people but the way our organization do business,
the old culture of the organization, the bureaucratic style. Vietnam joined
WTO in late 2006 and the competition is being more and more fierce, a
number of foreign companies in every fields are coming to VN to do
business. If we want to compete we have to reorganize our structure and to
change our working style if we do not change and do not change
immediately we can not survive. Like a legendary CEO once said: in order
to survive tomorrow we have to learn to kill ourselves today.
2.2. The difficulties and challenges we face
The need for Vietnamese SOEs to change is obvious and urgent but why
people do not want to change and only a little progress has been made so far.
We should study and understand the causes in order to have the right
solutions to the process.