Samsung Electronics will simplify job titles of their employees under the rank of director in an effort to break the rigid corporate hierarchy and promote work performance, Samsung Group said Friday.
(Yonhap)
Starting from March 1, the South Korean tech giant will remove seven top-down job titles – employee 1 (high school graduate), employee 2 (college graduate), employee 3 (university graduate), assistant manager, manager, senior manager and director.
Instead, the company will apply a new horizontal ranking system that will categorize workers from career levels one to four, based on their performance, Samsung officials said.
Under the new system, Samsung Electronics employees will put “nim” or “pro” as the suffix on their names they call each other.
However, those ranking higher than director, such as team leaders, group leaders and executives will retain their job titles.
“By breaking the vertical rigidity, the new personnel system will help workers respect each other’s work performance, rather than the time they have spent at the company,” an official said.
Samsung Electronics’ reshuffling of job titles was originally planned in the first half of last year, but has been delayed due to a delay in the executive-level reshuffle, following the prosecutors’ investigation into the firm’s involvement in the Choi Soon-sil scandal.
The simplification of job titles have been adopted by other conglomerates such as SK in recent years. The trend, however, has also stoked skepticism for failing to tackle the fundamentally rigid hierarchy system or ill-fitting with the Korean culture where honorifics are used for those senior in rank and age.
(yoonmi@heraldcorp.com)
