Analysis of Corporate Culture - Assignment Example

Questionnaire: 1. What do you understand by organizational culture? 2. How is organizational culture deduced or evaluated in an organization? 3. How do you define corporate culture? 4. How are corporate culture and organizational culture different or similar? 5. What do you understand by corporate identity? 6. How are corporate identity and corporate culture related? 7. How important do you think is corporate culture for an organization? More specifically, for the restaurant industry? 8. What are the factors that influence the corporate culture? 9. What are the impacts of culture on the organization and the employees? Results 1. What do you understand by organizational culture? Organizational culture is a set of values, attitudes and beliefs that are shared by all those who work within the organization. Culture adds a very distinct and identifiable quality to any organization and helps in differentiating it from other organizations. For example, in some organizations like Google, the organizational culture is very open and the employees are allowed quite a lot of freedom to schedule their work day in such a manner that they get to spend time at the café, at the recreation room or at the gym if they want. The underlying assumption is that the employees are mature enough to take responsibility of their work and careers. The organization culture is therefore supportive of individual development, appreciative of individual uniqueness and encourages all to contribute their best in their own ways. On the other end of the spectrum are organizations, like the police departments, that have a closed culture that stresses on uniformity and gives important to group development and welfare on the basis of combined effort. So culture is one, a broad guideline or framework that determines how organizations internally function, and two, helps in creating a distinct identity of the organization to the external entities. 2. How is organizational culture deduced or evaluated in an organization? Organizational culture can be deduced from the communication channels and flow of communication within the organization. How people communicate with each other, what forms of communication they employ, for example, emails, postal messages between departments, verbal communications etc. It is also seen in how open the channel of communications are between the managers and the employees, and how often the managers are involved in interactions with the employees. Another way of assessing organizational culture is from how the people dress and how they set-up or decorate their desks. For example, it could be a very informal or a very formal code of dress that may be encouraged by the organization, and that again will be dependent upon the culture of the organization. Further, organizational culture can also be seen in the way employees behave during their breaks or during their lunch hours, as this is the time they are least guarded pr alert about others watching them, and thus can be observed in their true forms. Another important source of observing organizational culture is from they way conflicts are resolved and from the manner in which the employees interact with their managers and among themselves. Organizational culture is something that can be perceived by sensing and observing the ambience at the workplace. 3. How do you define corporate culture? Corporate culture is something that is actively and consciously sought to be promoted by the organization. It is how the organization wants the outside world to view it and it also sets the basic framework for the internal code of conduct. Corporate culture can be deduced from the vision statement, written organizational values and aspirations and from its mission statements. It influence what the company wants to achieve, how it wants to achieve and how it wants to position itself in the minds of its customers, partners and employees. Corporate culture is evolved overtime with the understanding of its owners and managers, and it is developed by and directed by these top level executives. In the terms of the restaurant industry, the corporate culture is more like the thought and vision of the owners – the owners understand the market, they know what the customers’ expect and on the basis of this knowledge, they formulate an overall vision for their corporate culture. Thus, corporate culture enables the owners to provide a basic framework within which they expect the employees are expected to work. The corporate culture determines what the organization values, and what it strives for. Having it spelled out for the employees, means that the employees are made aware of their contribution in making the corporate culture live up to its stated values. In addition to providing a general guideline to the shape and direction of the organization, corporate culture also determines the promotions, rewards policy and the impacts upon the overall human resource policies and process of the organizations. 4. How are corporate culture and organizational culture different or similar? Ideally, the corporate culture should be the basic guiding light for the organizational culture. However, in practical terms, the organizational culture may not follow directly from the corporate culture as the organizational culture gets permeated and mediated by the presence of employees from diverse backgrounds. The corporate culture may still direct the development of most of the policies, procedures, processes and the organizational structure. However, the organizational culture may develop as a result of the employee’s interaction with the organization and with each other. It is more informal and at times requires the older employees to educate the newer recruits. On the other hand, corporate culture may be disseminated in the induction and orientation training and has legitimacy to it. Further, corporate culture is more flexible as the top management can change it to align it with the changed visions, while organizational culture is difficult to change. Further, corporate culture may encourage a certain set of values and best practices that have been identified as leading to organizational success. On the other hand, organizational culture is more spontaneous and it develops over a period of time with the interaction and assimilation of employees from diverse backgrounds and fields. As such, the organizational culture may not be really supportive of the best practices as espoused by the corporate culture and hence may even debilitate the organization. 5. What do you understand by corporate identity? Corporate identity is the way how the organization wants to position itself in the minds of its stakeholders as well as the competitors. Organizations consciously try to develop their distinct identity that reveals their own visions and values. Identity is actively sought to be developed by creating a distinct image of the organization. This involves creating a brand for the organization that encompasses it overall identity. For example, in the case of restaurants, a restaurant serving gourmet food, may want to develop its corporate identity as a specialty, high-end restaurant. Towards this, it will have to develop a suitable organizational logo, high quality paper for its menu cards, suitable designs on its menu cards, and attire its staff appropriately. In addition to these tangible factors that lead to the creation of corporate identity are also the standard and level of service provided or the quality of the products provided to the customer. Further, corporate identity is also established via customer care and support – how much the organization listens to feedback from the customer and also by its voluntary communications in the form of press releases and advertisements. 6. How are corporate identity and corporate culture related? Corporate culture helps in providing the support for maintaining the corporate identity. The desired corporate identity is first determined on the basis of marketing and economic considerations – as the organizations have to assess what will sell and lead to revenue generation. For example, in the case of a restaurant, if it is located near the office buildings where a lot of lower middle class workers are employed and who like to eat out, it cannot aspire to position itself as an elite restaurant. Business sense dictates that in such a location, a quick service, low cost restaurant may be able to attract more customers and generate regular revenue. So, corporate identity, in this case should be perhaps – a restaurant that is highly cost effective with great service. Now, the corporate culture – or the legitimate and formal top down culture – should be geared towards developing the above corporate identity. The restaurants vision could be to serve x number of customers within a work day, or to get x number of repeat customers over a period of time. This leads to a culture that focuses on timeliness, flexibility and encourages the employees to perform at a higher speed while maintaining their service levels. 7. How important do you think is corporate culture for an organization? More specifically, for the restaurant industry? Corporate culture is extremely important for organizations as it provides a vision and a framework of desirable performance, attitudes and behaviours. It influences the organizational culture as well as help in maintaining the corporate identity. In case of service intensive organizations like the restaurants, corporate culture gains added importance. This is because, where people coming with different cultural or social backgrounds have to be managed and motivated to perform, corporate culture provides a structural support for it. In restaurants where the service quality weighs heavily with the customers, the employee’s behaviours and attitudes need to conform with the customers expectations – and corporate culture induces them to serve the customers efficiently and effectively. 8. What are the impacts of culture on the organization and the employees? Organizational culture is very deep-rooted and provides the employees with a framework of accepted behaviour. It determines the limits within which the employees and the organizations are expected to carry out their communications and mutual interactions. In addition to the semi-formal boundaries that the organizational structure sets, it also dictates much of the informal methods of interpersonal interactions between the employees and between the employees and managers. It can be stated that culture taints almost all the actions of the individuals as it guides them about acceptable norms, behaviours and attitudes. While on one hand culture provides much clarity and educates the employees about how to appear, how to interact etc., this same quality of culture can also pose a hindrance to the progress of the organization. In case of any proposed changes that are to be enacted in order to be competitive in the outside market, the organizational culture may lead to resistance and non-compliance. Also, the director of Erbprinz hotel stated that culture is a potential tool as well as a potential restraining force in the organizational progress. If the culture is such that it promotes efficiencies, encourages commitment and customer service, then it will encourage the personnel to perform at their optimum best. On the other hand if the culture encourages cut throat competition among the employees by such a reward and compensation system, then it will only lead to selfish attitudes and behavious and with little or no commitment to organization or focus on the customers. Analysis – to add 1. What do you understand by organizational culture? The director of the hotel restaurant Erbprinz stated that in his view, organizational culture was the values, beliefs and attitudes that were shared across the organization and which made the organization distinct from other organizations. The available literature too has indicated towards this interpretation of organizational culture, for example, culture is “defined as the communal programming of the human mind which tells apart the members of one human commune from those of the other in a sense that it plays the role of a system of collectively detained values” (Ashkanasy, 2003; Alvesson, 2002). Further, according to Schein (1992), culture provides for a collective pattern of suppositions, norms and values, that impart guidance and direction to the members of that group towards their acceptable codes of conducts. Culture helps the individual employees to formulate their attitudes and thoughts that are helpful in letting them streamline their behaviors towards positive and constructive work Schein (1992). It also helps the individual employees, as well as the organizations in whole, to formulate a suitable method of interaction with its external environment comprising of the partners, customers, competitors, media and the government (Hall et. al, 2001). The analysis of the director’s response shows that his understanding of culture is consonant with the way it has been elaborated in the available literature. It also indicates that in the restaurant industry and in German restaurants, the concept of organizational culture is well-entrenched and also guides the over all development of policies and procedures. Not only the top managers of the restaurant know what comprises of organizational culture, but they are also aware of the potency of the culture to create distinct identity for the corporate. 2. How is organizational culture deduced or evaluated in an organization? This was a very important question that was posed at the director of Erbprinz, as it lead to an evaluation of his actual and practical understanding of what exactly comprises of organizational culture. The director responded by stating various things that determine and organization’s culture and most of his responses could be backed by the results of the previous literature survey. According to the director, culture is seen in the communications – both horizontal and vertical, and both formal and informal. This implies that culture manifests itself greatly in the form of the interpersonal interactions as well as in the quality of those interactions. It can be understood that all communication is directed by or encouraged by the basic underlying assumptions and suppositions that the involved people believe. (Schein 1992). As such, the organizational culture which in turns impacts upon these basic assumptions and suppositions, also impacts upon the way people communicate with each other. For example, in the case of formal communications, if the organization culture is open and encouraging of employee feedback and involvement, then the communication will freely flow vertically. If the organizational culture encourages the employees to interact with each other, to intermingle and spend time with each other in order to develop a sense of belongingness at the work place, then again, the employees will appear more relaxed and free during their lunch and breaks. On the other hand, if the organizational culture is such that it places stress on employee productivity alone, then the employees will be made to feel that any time spent away from work is bad. In this case, there will be little interaction seen among the employees and they may be more tense and worked up. The director also pointed out that it is also the physical settings of the workplace that help in deducing the organizational culture. This again falls within the realm of literature that indicates that organizational culture can be espied through different means – through artifacts, through adopted values, and through basic suppositions or values. (Schein 1992). 3. How do you define corporate culture? The director defined corporate culture as an active and conscious set of values attitudes and behaviors that the organization wants its employees to indulge in. In addition, he stated that corporate culture provides the external face of the organization and shapes the way external entities view the organization. Both these aspects of culture are well documented in the available literature on corporate culture and corporate identity. According to Thorsen (2005), corporate culture provides a lens through which the employees interpret what is expected of them at the workplace. It also determines how Further, any shift in the corporate culture entails a corresponding shift in the corporate identity – thus enumerating the fact that the corporate culture has the power to influence how the organization is perceived in the external business environment. Also, the director’s contention that the corporate culture leads to the development of specific hr policies and influences the business operations and processes, also finds support by the research done by Grief (1994) and documented in the literature review. According to Grief, the corporate culture of Japanese firms encourages more employee productivity and ensures added commitment as it leads to policies that promote internal employees to higher positions, and also ensures that employees are treated as families. This link between corporate culture and overall employee performance and commitment has also been established by other researchers (Thorsen, 2005). 4. How are corporate culture and organizational culture different or similar? The director’s response to the above question provided great insights and also provided a common sense approach to the subject of culture. While most of the literature covered in the review does not make a specific or significant distinction between organizational culture and corporate culture, the director of Erbprinz stated several noteworthy differences in the two. According to the director, the corporate culture and the organizational culture are operant at two different planes. The corporate culture is consciously developed under the guidance of the owners or the top management of the organization while the organizational culture evolves with the coming together of the employees, business processes and the customers. The corporate culture is what the organization wants the employees to do, while the organizational culture sets a limit to what actually they do. In the terms stated by the interviewed director, it is the corporate culture that provides direction for high performance while it is the organization culture that determines how much the employees are ready to perform. The statement that corporate culture has the potential to encourage high performance has been validated in the literature that shows that corporate culture can lead to high stock rates, high income and high return on investment ((Mcfarlin, 2002). The understanding of the corporate culture and the organizational culture on the above lines leads to useful learnings. It indicates that the management needs to be aware of the organizational culture and should adopt measures to keep the organizational culture consistent with the corporate culture. The culture of the organization should be actively monitored, and factors that are identified as debilitating the overall corporate culture should be weeded out. 5. What do you understand by corporate identity? The interviewed director stated that corporate identity is the position or the image that the organization wants to create in the minds of its various stakeholders – its suppliers and partners, its customers and its competitors. It is a definition similar to the one given by Paulmann (2006), that “Corporate Identity can be construed as the strategic approach to the positioning of a corporation as describes the identity traits”. These identity traits could be observed in the way the organization treats its employees, interacts with its customers and partners, in its service and product quality and in its social and environmental responsible behaviour. The director believed that corporate identity could be communicated via the physical setting and layout of the organization especially if its is a restaurant, and by the quality of its personnel and staff. This again is provided evidence by the literature where corporate identity is stated to be assessed by how the organization appears in terms of its ambience, in terms of its attitudes towards customers and employees, and in terms of its future aspirations (Paulmann, 2006). It is also determined in terms of its logos, symbols and other paraphernalia (Knights and Willmott, 1999). The interview also revealed that corporate identity is something that the organization consciously seeks to develop and promote. According to Paulmann (2006), this is very true as organizations spend time and resources, and at times, even hire professionals to develop their own distinct corporate identities in the hope of gaining market benefits. Thus, the corporate identity is not only crucial for the organization’s success, but its development and maintenance requires considerable thought and effort. 6. How are corporate identity and corporate culture related? According to the director of Erbprinz, corporate identity and corporate culture are inter-related. The corporate identity is developed in the basis of economic and marketing considerations, while the corporate culture is developed to provide support to the achievement of that specific corporate identity. While there has been scarce research done on topics exploring the real relationship between the corporate identity and corporate culture, there has been considerable amount of literature available that elaborates upon both separately. However, when read together, it can be seen that the director of Erbprinz hotel did have a significant point when he referred to the corporate culture underpins the corporate strategy. For example, the Paulman states that “corporate identity puts the organizational traits together in to an action framework”, while corporate culture has been determined as facilitating the organizational functioning to achieve the corporate thoughts and visions (Smircich, 1985). The Thus, the corporate identity is a manifestation of what the organization stands for while corporate culture helps in realizing the corporate identity. Additionally, corporate culture and organizational culture reflect upon the corporate identity as well. This is because, for example, the corporate culture influences the employees attitude towards customers, and customers will formulate their image of the organization on the basis of the employees behaviour. As such, it can be said that corporate culture and corporate identity share a cyclical relationship where each influences the other. However, this does not mean that such a relationship occurs in isolation or is exclusive– there are several other factors worth exploring that may lead to the development and maintenance of corporate identity and corporate culture. 7. How important do you think is corporate culture for an organization? More specifically, for the restaurant industry? Corporate culture was stated as the most important aspect of keeping the employees focused on the customers. The interviewed director stated that corporate culture, especially in the restaurants and hotels industries was geared towards fulfilling customer expectations and as such, provided a framework of attitudes, customer service and quality for the employees to emulate. This helped in the development of customer satisfaction, repeat customers as well as lead to increased revenue generation. Some targeted studies have been undertaken evaluating the direct impacts of corporate culture on revenue generation, and it has been found that corporate culture does lead to high performance and commitment in the employees (Arbor, 2006). It has also been found to influence the overall growth in corporate investment, shares and revenues (Quappe, et. al, 2006). This may be because the corporate culture defines the set of values that are needed for high performance. As such, it may be a key factor in the overall business success or failure. 9. What are the impacts of culture on the organization and the employees? Culture is deep rooted and it guides the overall manner in which individuals groups or organizations act and interact with each other. As culture is directly linked to the action or the behaviour, it has the potential to influence performance and hence the success of the organization. It is also the corporate culture that determines the overall satisfaction and motivation level of the employees and focuses them on customer service. Several researchers have provided evidence that corporate culture impacts upon the overall revenue generation of the organization by influencing its internal policies and external communications and actions (Dixon, 2005; Quappe, et. al, 2006). Similarly, it has been found that organizations that encourage high performing cultures and exhibit employee focus, do enjoy a better position in the market and have more loyal employees (Dixon, 2005). In conclusion it can be said that the interview of the hotel director provided additional inputs on the subject of organizational culture, corporate culture and corporate identity. It was revealed that corporate culture influence both the corporate identity as well as the internal organizational culture. It helps in keeping the organizations and employees focused on their stated vision and objectives and also acts as a guiding framework for better organizational performance. Read More