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Every organization has a different value, which defines how people and employees

behave and how the organization does its operation. Implementing those values to successful

existence of the organization is one of today’s most important job for leaders, and when

leaders first name comes to a large number of people’s mind is Steve Jobs and how his

influence and personality single handily transformed apple and its culture to the creative

innovation with maximum human resource support. It’s culture that directs company’s

functioning and has a big impact on success and failure, for example, recession of 2008

caused by one of the biggest famous business failures, the collapse of Lehman Brothers,

which has high service culture and client-first but after the deaths of family members new

policy of profits and growth led to unethical behavior which ultimately resulted in

bankruptcy.

Culture’s emergence in any organization follows its founder or leader’s ideas or

values as a vision, which leads to success, for example, In-N-Out Burger’s culture reflects its

founder’s philosophy of serving customers and caring employees which remain at the center

of company’s culture. So how can one identify the culture of any organization? The answer is

through inferences based on observable behaviors like Rites, ceremonies, stories, symbols,

etc. Rites are activities as examples to show cultural values like when I joined our institute

and all of the seniors and faculties welcomed us to feel like home in induction event. later one

week of orientation program helped us to know fellow students and activities were held to

create a bond among students. Also, a residential program can be inferred as one of the

symbols of open communication, and equality. These things reinforce the institute’s core

values of open culture, learning through practices and fair processes. Similarly, stories of past

events are shared among employees where an employee acted as Hero to serve the company’s

values. So, in relation to institutes and schools’ past students and alumni’s stories are told to

new students to inform about their culture and values.

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Organizations want a culture that is in sync or strengthens the strategy and design

which are required to be successful in their environment. To fit this relationship of strategy,

culture, structure, and environment, four categories of cultures are formed. The adaptability

culture is about change with respect to the external environment to provide students a real-

world knowledge about industries, reacting quickly to industry needs but also creating an

innovative idea. Second, the mission culture is about stability without rapid change and

employees are responsible for performance with rewards and bonuses being given after

meeting goals. The clan culture is about the involvement of employees in a rapidly changing

environment and taking care of their needs. Google is one of the best examples where

‘employee first’ culture is the way to high performance. The last, bureaucratic culture is

traditional consistency driven culture where policies and discipline are ways to achieve goals,

Militaries are examples of this type where everyone has clearly defined roles and

responsibilities.

One important thing to remember is that any initiative to improve culture or change

in the existing structure is challenged because of the human nature of resisting to the new

environment and these transformation efforts fail. The reason is, most leaders do not follow

certain steps because of time constraints and they skip those steps. Related to transformation

is a Case study of Western Union where CEO, Christina Gold faced many challenges in

restructuring initiative since many US leaders did not want to give up control. Another

interesting concept relating to control is boundary systems, which tell our tendency to

remember things which are told not to do since childhood ‘NO’ is inherited in our brains.

These are very important to keep a check on companies that are growing fastest and act as

breaks to them.

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