Culture Is The Mind 's Way Of Separating One Group Of People From Another ( Kawar )

The term "culture" has been used more and more recently but what exactly does it mean? Some have even regarded culture as "the most central problem of all social science" (Malinowski, 1939). According to Merriam Webster (2016), culture is defined as the arts and other manifestations of human achievements. If culture was as simple as Merriam-Webster defines it then the lives of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists would be much easier. As we know, culture varies greatly across religion, countries, and some cases in just states; the difference between the north and the south. We can conclude that culture is a set of shared thoughts, values, and cognitions (Geertz, 1973). With culture in itself varying tremendously based on values and location, then surely organizational culture is no simple concept either. The term "organizational culture" has just recently become to be used more (Barley, 1988). Though there may be disagreements on defining culture universally, researchers tend to agree that culture is of vital importance in an organizational context, whether that organization is a company or a government (Kilmann, Saxton, & Serpa, 1986).

Culture is an observable, powerful force in any organization. “Made up of its members’ shared values, beliefs, symbols, and behaviors, culture guides individual decisions and actions at the unconscious level. As a result, it can have a potent effect on a company’s well-being and success” (One Page, n.d.).

Cultural differences according to Adler "involves the integrated and maintained system of socially acquired values, beliefs, and rules of conduct which impact the range of accepted behaviors distinguishable from one societal group to another". (Adler, N. J. (1997). International dimensions of organizational behavior (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Shout-Western College Publishing)

Every organization has values and beliefs that define what they do and how they do things in the organization. These values have significant influence on how the employees behaves and the general performance of the organization – it is these set of values and beliefs, rooted deep in the company’s organizational structure that depict the “dos”, “don’t” and the “hows”, of the organization and these unequivocally represents the culture of the organization. This concept became popular in the 1980s when Peters and Waterman in their book: “In search of Excellence” presented the profound argument that, the success of any organization is inextricable linked to the quality of its culture. (Carpenter, M., Taylor, B., Erdogan, B. 2009 p183). The purpose of this paper is an attempt to analyse the impact diverse cultures played in the success of the Lincoln Electric Company.

All Organisations posses a distinct form of culture with some having more than a single culture. This culture is usually very difficult to measure, change and most especially change.

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

When asked to describe what culture is many people often associated with ethnic or national backgrounds, but the idea of businesses or organizations having their own cultural identities often doesn't come to mind. All businesses and organizations have their own way of running themselves and for that reason, their employees incorporate their own values based on the atmosphere which they must conform to everyday. This atmosphere influences greatly on how people work in an organization, employees can realize the relaxed state of their environment or merely to the abrasive ideals that are taken up by their employer. A business's cultural characteristics include things such as required work hours, appreciation of ideas, and dress code; all of these

Cultural conflict is a type of conflict that occurs when different cultural values and beliefs clash. when people emigrate from their country. one of the problems they will face is cultural conflict. It is in humans nature to fear different . It can be really hard to overlook the fact that different cultures have different values. These different values sometimes cause conflict. What one culture may value, another may not, and therefore a natural conflict is

Culture within an organisation is a system of shared values, beliefs and norms of individuals in the organisation and how the value consensus creates a way in which people behave. The shared values have a strong influence on the individuals in the organisation and dictates how a person acts, dresses and performs in their job. A unique culture is developed and maintained by an organisation which provides guidelines and boundaries, through informal means, for the behaviour of the people within the organisation.

Globalization and technological advancement have dictated the need for managers to deal with multiple ethnic groups with different culture in their day to day interactions. According to Kulkarni (2012), cultures play critical roles in individuals, including values, beliefs, humor, worries, fears, hopes, opinions, attachments, and anxieties.

The Hofstede Centre (n.d.) defines culture as the “collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another.” Chipulu, Ojiako, Gardiner, Williams, Mota, Maguire, Shou, Stamai, and Marshall (2014), note that “culture can be at once tangible and observable; latent and unobservable; or even an abstraction altogether” (p. 367). Culture therefore has many dimensions. Some aspects of culture can be observed by analyzing symbols, ceremonies, dress, and other aspects. On the other hand, some aspects are not observable from the outside, but have to be experienced. Looking only from the outside gives us only a glimpse into the culture values. A large part of culture is the unwritten rules of how things are done. This part of culture is not necessarily observable to an outsider. To fully understand the cultural values of an organization, you need to be inside the organization with access to those with years of work experiences.

Cultural Conflict – clash of different ways of life over scarce resources, religion, race, land, oil, water, power, etc

Every manager should have deep knowledge about culture because we live in globalization time. What is culture? Culture is a system of values, beliefs, and norms shared among a group of people. People`s culture affect the values in the workplace. That’s why management processes should be different according to cultures and according to the people from different cultures in the workplace.

Culture is defined to the group of people which learned behavior that has already gave the instruction from previous generation through next generation by imitation and language (Adler 1983 citing Barnouw 1963). Also Schein (1990) describes that culture is a lesson that a group has been studied and solved the problem for internal integration and learnt to survive from external environment for over period of time. For example, behavior, cognition and emotion processes and in the deepest level which is included perception, language and thought processes such as attitudes and feelings. For most of organizations nowadays have to face with an increasing of a diversity of employees which are multicultural employees especially for multinational corporation (MNC) (Fitzsimmons 2013). To deal with different cultures and nationalities, the companies and managers have to learn and understand their employees such as common language, knowledge sharing and performance (Lauring & Selmer 2011) then see how multicultural individuals can help and contribute the organizations (Fitzsimmons, Miska & Stahl 2011) and set the policies or principles for employees could be followed (Demo et al. 2012).

The classic Phrase by Mckinsey organisation, “the culture is how we do things around here” is taken as reference by many great people. It’s true that culture exist in an organisation which influences the work being done and also affects the success or failure of the project.