Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 15th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Main Conference Theme Author(s) Carolyn Ban University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania United States none Title ENLARGING EUROPE: EASTERN EUROPEANS IN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract All organizations face the challenges of melding staff who come from different backgrounds, developing effective means of communication with the organization, fostering an organizational culture with shared values and understanding of mission and management style, and, in the case of public organizations, bringing the staff together to make policy recommendations or decisions. All these challenges are far greater for international organizations, with staff from multiple countries who speak different languages and who come with different institutional experiences and communication and management styles. In 2004, eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe joined the European Commission, and two more will become members in January of 2007. A number of scholars have addressed the impact of EU membership on those states, but no one thus far has examined the impact on the European Union itself, and especially on the European Commission. This process of enlargement provides us with an ideal laboratory to study the process of socialization and of development of organizational culture within the Commission and its staff. This will be the first report of a large-scale and on-going research project, which is supported by the European Commission. It has direct relevance for the conference theme of leadership and management in the public sector, with a focus on management in international organizations. The paper will examine the process of selection of staff from new member states, their training and integration into the Commission. It looks both at how they adapt to the Commission and how the organization itself adapts to them. A central issue will be organizational culture, with an understanding of the national cultures in which these new Commission employees were educated and received their first work experiences and the adjustment to the possibly very different culture of the European Commission.
