Management fosters a culture of "siloed" groups and organizations. The fragmentation between Germany and the US is very apparent. Often times, there is little cooperation to no cooperation between groups - it seems they only look out for themselves, which is a shame. Management doesn't set the tone to change this. For the 10 years that I have been with the company, it has always been this way.
They recently changed their compensation structure within the past few years. In order to get promoted from within your group, the promotion money comes out of the overall merit pot for the group - which means that if you are promoted, all others in the group will have a lower merit increase for the year. This and the fact that the merit "pot" for the past few years has only been around 3% is beginning to cause folks to believe that there is a have vs have-not attitude towards the company. This is especially true when we as employees see emails from the division CEO telling us that we've meet or beat our financial targets every year, for the past 5 years.
Vertical movement is a challenge. There are a large group of individuals that came over from Pratt & Whitney a while back. You'll notice that quite a few of these individuals are the ones in management positions. It almost feels (and you hear this quite a bit from a lot of people) that if you did not come from Pratt, and are not part of the "good ol' boy's club" that you have virtually no chance for vertical movement in some groups / organizations.
Since the company is a German company, there are a lot of challenges when working with anyone from Germany. Beware of this - Germans have a much different work ethic than we do here in the US.
