The Management of Organisational Culture Is Central to Contemporary Management Ideas and Practices - Essay Example

Organizational Culture Introduction Organizational culture refers to the studies and management of the organizational psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values (personal and cultural values) etc. Current organizations are operating in an extremely globalized environment and hence it is difficult for an organization to adopt a uniform culture. For example, many of the American organizations are currently operating in India and China like emerging markets. It is difficult for them to cultivate American culture in their Indian or Chinese organizations. Cultural adaptation of business is necessary for organizations to maintain their success records in business especially when they operate internationally. “American management had been preoccupied by rational and systematic aspects of management like organizational structures and strategies whereas Japanese companies had a more holistic approach which included attention to people’s skills and management styles” (Grey, 2009, p.65). Along with the changes happening in the life styles, attitudes and philosophies of people, organizational culture is also undergoing constant changes. Scientific and technological advancements contributed heavily in rewriting some of the traditional and established organizational principles. The introduction of internet and computers has revolutionized the organizational world and the concept of business has changed a lot because of that. Organizational communication strategies underwent drastic changes because of computers, internet and mobile phones. Current organizations realized the importance of a healthy organizational environment for the better productivity of the organization. New techniques like teamwork, outsourcing, offshoring etc like business strategies have gained prominence in the current organizational world in place of the traditional concepts like individual work, insourcing etc. Moreover, current organizations are more particular about doing something for the community in which it operates and also for environmental protection in order to demonstrate their corporate social responsibilities. This paper briefly analyses the current organizational culture existing in the global organizational world. Organizational Culture: Environment Musacco Ph.D (2009) has pointed out that “harassment, mobbing, bullying, and emotional abuses are common at the workplaces which resulted in increased fear and minimal trust between workers” (Musacco Ph.D, 2009, p.2). It is difficult for an organization to progress rapidly if the environment does not provide the necessary atmosphere. Most of the organizations are currently operating in a multicultural environment because of globalization and liberalization. Current organizations are places where different people from different social, economical, cultural, communal and political backgrounds are working together. These people may have extremely different attitudes and characters. It is difficult to assume that these individuals respect each other and work for the common goal. Different opinions and views may occur between workers which may often result in harassment, mobbing, bullying, and emotional abuses. Organization should ensure that no bullying or harassment is taking place in their premises with respect to cultural or any other forms of differences. Current organizations are working in an extremely tensed environment. Competition is too high and the economic conditions are not so good. The stress levels of the current employees are more than that of the employees of the earlier generation. “Stress, anger and turmoil at workplace have the effect of creating more toxic work environments” (Musacco Ph.D, 2009, p.51). Family, society and workplace are the three major places in which a person commonly interacts. The commitments towards these three entities are growing day by day and along with that the stress levels of the employees also increasing. In short, for maintaining a healthy organizational culture, current organizations need to do everything possible to reduce the stress levels of the employees and also to reduce the competition from other organizations. Gender is another environmental factor which can affect an organizational culture internally. Even though, both males and females are working in most of the positions in the modern organizations, still some reservations are there. For example, females are well suited to the secretarial and clerical jobs whereas males are least suited to such jobs. On the other hand, males are more suited to marketing profession which requires extensive travelling compared to females. Even though, many developments were happened in the modern organizational world, still some jobs are conserved for the males and some other jobs are conserved for the females. In short, even in the modern organizational world or culture, gender plays an extremely important factor. In an environment undergoing change, such as during the privatization of state-owned enterprises, employees commitment to the organization is easily disrupted because privatization is often linked to downsizing. Downsizing has been found to have a negative influence on surviving workers loyalty, which is an important element of organizational commitment (Chen & Chen, 2008) Privatization brought both good and things and to the modern employees. Many of the public enterprises were privatized as part of the globalization policies and hence the employees forced to work in extremely tensed business environment. It is an accepted fact that private companies apply more pressure upon the employees compared to the public companies. As part of the pressure tactics, private companies often exercise punishment strategies like downsizing. Downsizing of employees will result in lessened productivity of the employees. Campbell et al, (2000) have argued that even the “survivors from the humiliating experience of downsizing may have worries about their own job security and concerns about the creation of heavier workloads due to the reduction of manpower” (Campbell et al, 2000, p.8). In short, downsizing may develop counterproductive behavior among employees which is a common thing in the modern organizational world. External environment is also as important as internal environment for an organization. Morgan (1989) has mentioned that everything exists in the context of wider environment as far as an organization is concerned (Morgan, 1989, p.72). Corporate social responsibility is a new term which entered the organizational world recently. Organizations have realized that it is necessary spent something in reply to the great services received by them from the community. Moreover, governments have strengthened the rules related to the exploitation of resources and the environmental protection. Environment of an organization is not limited to the organization and its surrounding areas alone. In the current globalized world, big organization has worldwide customers. For example, American business tycoon Microsoft has customers in almost the entire world. So any problems occurred in any part of the world can affect Microsoft because of its global presence. In short, current organizational culture has much wider perspectives compared to the organizational culture a couple of decades before. Organizational Culture: Teamwork Another major change happened in organizations in the recent past is the development of a different perspectives about teamwork. Earlier organizations thought that individual work is better than teamwork in order to assess the employee performances and to derive the maximum out of an employee. But recent studies and researches have shown that employees perform better in teams because of their reduced stress level compared to that in an individual work. When working in a team an employee gets help or assistance from all the other team members whereas such help cannot be anticipated in an individual work. Thus the individuals in a team may face less job related stress and the productivity of each team members will be increased immensely. The credit goes to the entire team rather than individuals when a team member performs an outstanding work. Same way when a team performs badly because of a particular team member, the blame goes to the team rather than to the individuals. The current organizational culture develops on teamwork. Teamwork has brought much flexibility in the current organizational culture. It is not necessary that a task meant for a particular team member should be done only that member alone. He can delegate that work to some other team ember if he finds any difficulty and can opt for another team task. Organization assesses only the final outcomes of the team project rather than how the team has completed the project. Whether all the team members delivered equally or not is not a matter of concern for the current organizations in which teams are operating. At the same time each member of a team are just like the links in a chain. The chain can be broken even if a single link became weak. Same way, the weak performance of even a single employee in a team can destroy the entire goals of the team and hence teams often function in an extremely supportive environment. Team leader are coordinating the team functions in an effective manner so that no weak links may affect the final outcomes of the team projects. Organizational Culture: Organizational Changes Organizational changes can affect the organizational culture immensely. There are different forms of organizational changes; Structural changes and functional changes which can affect the work culture inside the organization. In structural change, the organization make valiant effort to restructure the organization by promoting efficient people to suitable positions, shifting some employees from one department to another etc. Same problem may have different solutions. Same way, same issue could be tackled in different ways. In other words, the arrival of different people at the same position may bring different ideas and the organizational functions can be changed drastically. We have many examples in which some people succeeds in a position where his predecessors failed. In short, structural changes can bring different organizational culture. On the other hand for implementing functional changes, the organization usually redefines its policies, strategies, functioning etc with respect to the external business environment. “Functional resources can be transferred to maximize the value creation as the environment changes” (Hien, n. d). There are many cases in which organizations failed to prosper because of the poor strategies. For example, when globalization entered the horizon, Parker Pen tried to exploit it without proper home work. They tried to use same marketing strategies across the world for their pen products as they thought that for the same product marketing, a uniform strategy is good across the world. Bit thy failed to recognize that “the product may be the same, but the markets are different”. On the other hand, many other organizations exploited the possibilities of organization because of their customized strategies for each market. In short, functional changes can impact the organizational culture immensely. The strategies adopted by Microsoft for their Indian operations are a better example for explaining the changes in organizational culture. Microsoft has recently announced major structural changes in their top management team in their Indian operations. The chief executive officer and the managing director were separate people earlier and now they decided to make these two positions under two a single person. Microsoft has found problems in their functioning in India with two power centers. The two power centers, the CEO and MD failed to combine well in their Indian operations which forced Microsoft to think in terms of a single power centre. Technological advancements can change the organizational culture drastically. For example, the implementation of a new technology or a new accounting program can definitely bring considerable change in the accounting department of an organization. The better functioning of accounts department will be beneficial to the suppliers and customers of the company. In other words, a new technology introduced within the organization can bring positive changes internally and externally. Changes happening in the market can also affect the organizational culture. For example, the recent economic crisis forced many organizations to cut down their expenditure. Such expense cutting resulted in salary reduction or termination of jobs for some of the employees. Moreover, organizations started to increase the workload of the employees and tight norms were implemented inside the organizations because of the global recession. In short, the organizational culture has a direct link with the growth of the organization; a healthy culture can be expected when the organization grows whereas same thing cannot be said when an organization faces troubles. Another major organizational change happened in recent times is the opportunity based changes. It is the “changes that are not anticipated ahead of time but are introduced purposefully and intentionally during the change process in response to an unexpected opportunity, event, or breakdown” (Orlikowski and Hofman, 1997). For example, World Wide Web (www) has opened the world of immense possibilities in front of the organizations. It is easy for the organizations to reach the individual customers using the customized marketing strategies through www and internet. Another important example for opportunity based changes is the current global economic crisis. No organization can survive in the current economic world without taking measures to counter the threat from the current recess. Organizational Culture: Communication Organizational communication is another area which can change the organizational culture. For example, before the implementation of computers and internet most of the organizations used, typewriters, telephones and fax machines for communication purpose. The introduction of internet and e-mail has multiplied the speeds of communication and the efficiency of the organizations has improved a lot. The earlier culture of keeping paper works, book keeping, filing etc gave way for electronic data storage. Accounting people has got their jobs simplified very much and the top management started to assess the performance of the organization more effectively because of the technological changes happened. The invention of cell phones has made another breakthrough in the communication methods of organizations. Organization can communicate with any of its employees and customers any time because of the cell phones. In fact, many of the organizations nowadays provide their employees with cell phones in order to contact them whenever the organization requires their service. Such advanced technology implementation has made revolutionary changes in organizational culture. Organizational Culture: Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Gerard Hendrik Hofstede, the Dutch writer on the interactions between national cultures and organizational cultures has identified five dimensions for cultural aspects organizations; “Power Distance Index (PDI), Individualism (IDV), Masculinity (MAS), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) and Long-Term Orientation (LTO)” (Hofstede, 2009) Different organizations have different power distance indexes because of the cultural differences. Because of the political differences in America and China, there will be a big gap between the power structures of organizations in these countries. The manger- subordinate relationship is different in different countries like America and China because of the difference in power exerted by the managers. In some organizations autocratic methods will be implemented where as in some other countries democratic principles will be prevailed. Some organizations do not believe in team work and they will encourage individual work. Same way some organizations still keep reservations while allocating the jobs to males and females. Uncertain incidents can arise anytime in the work places and the response to such incidents will be important for the growth of the organization. Moreover some people may work for long term goals while some others may work for short term goals. These cultural differences at work place can play an important role in developing an organization’s culture. Organizational culture can be summarized or concluded in McLean’s (2005) words. In his opinion, Organizational culture is similar to a growing children“ (McLean, 2005, p.4). At the beginning of the organization, its culture is just like a child. The organization learns lot of lessons from the environment or society in which it operates just like a child learns lessons from the surroundings. These learning will be the capital for the cultural development of an organization. References 1. Campbell F, Worrall L, & Cooper C. (2000), The Psychological Effects of Downsizing and Privatisation, [Online], Available at: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/PDF/uwbs_WP001-00%20Campbell%20Worrall%20Cooper.pdf [Accessed on 22 October 2010] 2. Chen, H & Chen Y. 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Creative Organization Theory: A Resourcebook, Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc (February 1, 1989) 8. Musacco S. Ph.D,(2009) Beyond Going Postal: Shifting from Workplace Tragedies and Toxic Work Environments to a Safe and Healthy Organization, Publisher: BookSurge Publishing (January 27, 2009) 9. Orlikowski W. J. and Hofman J. D (1997) , An Improvisational Model of Change Management: The Case of Groupware Technologies [Online], Available at: http://ftp.ida.liu.se/~TDEI30/CCSWP191.html [Accessed on 22 October 2010] Read More