Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Organizational Culture
Organizational Culture
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.
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
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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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