Corporate Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Corporate Culture - Essay Example The concept of corporate culture that became widespread in the 1980s was mentioned in the book of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (1982), In Search of Excellence, in which it was also, mentioned the potential impacts the values and the mindsets of a company could have on its success. There are many factors which influence the shaping or developing of an organizational culture. Buchanan and Huczyenski (1991) came up with four main factors. They argued that for a corporate culture to develop, an organization is required to have a strong and sound set of values, which is usually set up by the organization's founder. Those values are expected to carry forward through the top managerial levels that strengthen the firm's standards and a social learning process is evolved as an outcome. Secondly, the environment of an organization, such as the mention of company's heroes, symbols and notices present will affect the style of how the organization is run and functions. The stories of past efficient employees of the business who contributed greatly to the performance and development of the organization that circulate around in an organization greatly affect the way the rest of the employees work and behave in the organization. ... The methods can be formal and informal, one-way or two-way and can be both. However, communication is a strong factor as it depicts the present culture of the organization and affects others. The training sessions and induction and orientation practices used for communication also develop the way things are handled in a business and thus the corporate culture gets affected. Moreover, what are interrelated with the communication factor are the cultural networks. This implies the set of common beliefs a group of people share within themselves. If a set of values and assumptions are shared by a large group of people that is bound to be the dominant corporate culture in the organization. However, if cultural networks are scattered in an organization, then the organizational culture tends to be weak as no one is following a fixed set of values. The leadership and management style also shapes up the culture around in a business as the managers are usually known as the culture carriers and convey it to the rest of people working in an organization. John Kotter and James Heskett (1992) came up with two types of organizational culture, adaptive culture and inert culture. Adaptive culture as the name implies, is a flexible way of doing things where external factors are taken into account and changers are made in the organization accordingly. Decision making is usually centralized as it facilities greater flexibility in decision making and risk taking. The inert culture is unresponsive to the external environment and has a set of rigid beliefs which it does not change. Decision making is often centralized and there is a