Organisation Culture - Coursework Example

shed in 1976, and which is based in Bangladesh, can be characterized as part of the Grameen Foundation, an organization aiming to help people worldwide to develop an income that allows them to cover their basic needs. Two are the key tools used by the Grameen Foundation in order to achieve this target: microfinance and technology. Grameen Bank is aligned with the above rule providing to poor people financing solutions, through appropriately customized microfinance schemes, so that they can develop their own business.

Current paper explores the following issue: how does Grameen Bank’s Culture empower poor local women to earn a livelihood. In this context, the Bank’s current culture will be explored and analyzed at the level that it can respond to the specific need, i.e. the empowerment of poor local women to earn a livelihood. The issue described above is explored using two theoretical frameworks, as appropriate for the analysis of such issue: the Hofstede framework on culture (Figure 1, Appendix) and the theory of Schein on the three – level of culture (see Figure 2, Appendix).

Hofstede tried to identify those elements that are most likely to be parts of a nation’s culture, meaning that these elements can be the basis for the differentiation of each population from other populations in terms of culture. The study developed by Hofstede revealed that there are five categories of characteristics that distinguish populations internationally: ‘a) the level of individualism, b) the power distance, c) the uncertainty avoidance, d) the masculine-feminism and e) the dynamism’ (Tian, 2004, p.18). The above elements/ criteria are used in order to explain the strategies followed by the Grameen Bank for supporting the poor women; also these elements are used for understanding the perspectives of the bank’s plans in regard to the financial development of poor women, at least for covering their basic needs.

The second theoretical framework used in order to