Considering how business is conducted by organizations of today’s era, expanding consumer base, sales, profits, and international relations have become more of an interest. Competing on an international basis has allowed companies to expand in various dimensions, in which organizational leaders have become more receptive to in order to either become and/or remain competitive. Global expansionism can provide many values from creating employment opportunities, maximizing sales/profits, fluctuating supply and demand, and importantly mitigating economies risk from suffering from any depressive state. Global expansionism is not a facet that businesses should just liberally enter as there are threats and opportunities with any venture. …show more content…
I chose this organization because they are a great example that presents diverse cultural qualities within the organizations.
Assurant Specialty Property presents definitive culture in its very own logo. The logo is made up of a rubber-band ball with triangles within the ball. The ball is filled with the colors blue, green and orange with each color defining the companies’ missions and goals. The green represents the company’s growth and pursuance of attaining dominance lucratively. The blue represents the ocean and how business is conducted with their international affiliates. While lastly the color orange defines Assurant’s measures in maintaining joy within the employees, partners and affiliates. The triangles are a symbolic for business being done within the relationship of all Assurant’s business affiliates. This rubber-banded ball filled with symbolism is formed this way to present unity.
Observable artifacts, espoused values, and enacted values of organizations are put in place to establish trends. Those trends will be different for every organization and region of people being that establishing culture is determined from a collaboration of leadership team and employees experiences. It is important for organizations to strategically plan for cultural advancement. According to Strategic Management Group,
“Culture consists of the symbols, rituals, language, and social dramas that highlight organizational life, including myths, stories, and jargon. It includes the shared meanings associated with the symbols, rituals, and language. Culture combines the philosophy of the firm with beliefs, expectations, and values shared by members. It contains the stories and myths about the company's founder and its current leading figures. Organizational culture consists of a set of shared meanings and values held by a set of members in an organization that distinguish the organization from other organizations. An organization's culture determines how it perceives and reacts to the larger environment (Becker, 1982; Schein, 1996). Culture determines the nature
The reason I decided on this particular organization is because it was the most interesting one to me. As I was reading about the organization and their relation to sustainability, I started to get engaged in what I was reading
Internally, organizational culture, a set of important assumptions that members of an organization share in common, should be established to provide meaning, direction, and a basis for action (Pearce & Robinson, 2004). The organization would benefit if leaders promote and identify key themes and dominant values within the organization to reinforce competitive advantage they seek to maintain and build (Pearce & Robinson, 2004).
“Organizational culture consists of a set of shared meanings and values held by a set of members in an organization that distinguish the organization from other organizations” (Baack, 2012). These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the organization and dictate how they dress, act, and perform their jobs. Culture plays a huge role in the guiding of the behaviors of employees of an organization. There are three stages of culture that interact with one another to influence the behaviors in the organization. These stages are: observable artifacts, espoused values, and enacted values.
Organizational culture could almost be considered the roots of a company. The way a company’s employees think, the way the customers feel, and the company’s decisions are made are all based around the culture that the company has laid for itself. An employee’s values, thoughts, and actions should reflect those stated in the company’s mission. Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, while both attempting to create a culture that is comfortable and pleasing to their
Thus, the true culture of the organization cannot be understood by solely looking at the artifacts. To understand more, it is necessary to look at the next level. Espoused beliefs and values are goals, values, aspirations and ideologies shared by everyone in an organization. Normally, these values are laid down by the leaders or founders of the organization (Schein, 2010, p.25). However, espoused beliefs and values can sometimes be mutually contradictory (Schein, 2010, p.27). Thus, the organization’s culture is only understood just on the surface level. Basic underlying assumptions, which are unconscious and taken-for-granted beliefs and values provides for a deeper understanding of an organization’s culture. Schein concluded that the essence of a culture lies in the pattern of basic underlying assumptions (Schein, 2010, p.32). If the basic underlying assumptions are not deciphered, it will be hard to understand the artifacts and espoused beliefs and values correctly.
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.
Organization wants to achieve the objectives of sustained growth and increased profitability, organization must constant innovation its product or service, also need to carry out some plans to expand its business to enable an organization to have a better development. Organization expands its business cannot be confined to the domestic market must also move abroad, which effectively allows an organization closer to the global market and broadening the scope of business and profitability. However, business expansion is not as easy in this global environment, globalization has not only changed the enterprise competitive landscape also influence the way leaders conduct business (Caligiuri, 2006). Furthermore, with globalization, global leadership in terms of cultural knowledge needed to become more acute and require more advanced level of cognitive ability on the complexity of managing the demand of multiple cultures while completing managerial tasks (Caligiuri, 2006, Grosse, 2011). Therefore, the development of global management skills is very important for the global organizations and managers. Only effective in developing global management skills can help the organization reduce the risk of international business
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.
Due to this, the effort to identify and understand how trends and traits making up organizational culture have been a priority amongst most organizations seeking to improve the effectiveness of strategic leadership. According to Schein (2004), the reason why such issues as culture and leadership is important stems from one of the critical factors, that is the fact that certain trends and traits are shared among a group hence forming a shared culture. Schein also explains other critical elements of the culture, such as structural stability. The definition of a culture within an
There are many opportunities available for companies willing to venture into new, international markets. Reaching more customers and therefore, turning a larger profit are two fairly obvious reasons for companies to consider global expansion. However, the potential benefits do no end there. Expanding to international markets can hold less obvious, yet extremely beneficial appeals such as access to new and different talent pools, grander output requires great advances in efficiency, and international expansion can, in some cases, aid in “future proofing” the company.
The world offers significant business opportunities for every company, however, opportunities are accompanied by significant challenges for managers. Managing global operations across diverse cultures and markets represents a big challenge and opportunity for companies. To compete in the global market and be successful, companies must learn the strategies, policies, norms and technology necessary to conduct international business. The opportunities for global expansion are numerous, and attaining success is a matter of developing the right strategy to win local markets and its consumers.
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,
The forces of globalization are generally credited with the major role played in increasing the access of organizations to countless resources. Due to market liberalization for instance, large corporations are able to import cheap resources from various global regions and as such patronize the market through price leadership strategies. Nevertheless, another crucial characteristic of globalization is that it allows economic agents an incremental access to larger customer markets. This virtually means that manufacturers get to sell their products to numerous global regions and exponentially increase their revenues.
Globalization has created a great amount of advantages and disadvantages for businesses of all different varieties. International business relationships have allowed companies to operate more efficiently by moving manufacturing to foreign nations that offer cheaper labor (Petri, 1991). Additionally, the business environment is greatly impacted by global forces that may put organizations at a disadvantage (Lowe & McCrohan, 1989). When companies operate on a global level, they are expected to respond to the cultural and economical dynamics of the nations in which they are conducting business (Petri, 1991). Failing to acknowledge such dynamics can ultimately discourage foreign consumers from purchasing goods and services that are offered from international businesses (Lowe & McCrohan, 1989). Moreover, organizations face larger competition as well as exchange risk.