Strong Corporate Cultures - Assignment Example

The paper 'Strong Corporate Cultures' is a perfect example of a business assignment. Corporate culture can be defined as specific values, beliefs, and attitudes developed over time and shared by organizational members. Culture guides behaviors of employees that are founding on congruent values that dictate how things are done. Organizational culture serves to shape the different policies and procedures within an organizational model and puts the entire organizational staff dedicated to achieving strategic goals, solving problems, and in most instances, achieving high productivity norms (Yilmaz and Ergun 2008).

Having a cohesive organizational culture ensures that the organization can elicit change throughout the business model with minimal resistance. If managers and leaders are sensitized to historical influences borne of culture, implementing new strategic goals becomes more simplistic because policies and procedures align with cultural values and normative belief systems. Having a fixed set of behavioral norms can also be disadvantageous for a corporation. It can create a herd-like mentality that discourages innovation, creativity, and individual staff members from taking the initiative.

This is especially true when the established culture does not promote adaptability. If the business environment becomes very volatile and uncertain, a strong and established culture may have difficulties adapting as organizational members become accustomed to performing tasks under a singular process. This potentially makes the culture unwilling to explore new ways of doing things (McFarlin 2002). Strong corporate cultures also have significant advantages, including better managerial control.

Deeply-embedded cultures serve to give managers opportunities to establish social controls that influence how employees make decisions and their particular behaviors (Ojo 2009). In some organizations that have a strict focus on quality and productive outputs, the ability to maintain compliance and controls is critical to establishing a competitive advantage for the firm.