The Impact Of Organizational Behavior On A Company 's Culture

To understand the organizational culture of a company, one needs to start by looking at the history. Lakeshore Learning Materials was born from a divorced mother of three named Ethelyn Kaplan, who took a dream and a chance by moving her family to California in 1954 to open a toy store. When she started noticing that teachers were interested in her material, Ethelyn realized that she needed to expand her business into educational materials. 60 years later, Lakeshore Learning Materials has grown into a company with over 2000 employees, 60 retail stores throughout the United States and growing. Lakeshore Learning Materials is currently headed by Ethelyn’s grandsons, Bo and Josh Kaplan. Under the supervision of Bo and Josh, Lakeshore continues to be a leader in the Educational Materials, yet still able to keep the family culture that their grandmother started. Highest quality customer service and hard work are the core values that shape Lakeshore’s Organizational Strategy. These high expectations aren’t hard for employees at Lakeshore because the company is so loved by everyone that works there, that they give nothing less than the best.

Organizational structure has been set up to facilitate all goal achievements. It is a way to motivate their employees and get them to work together. It also helps its employees to follow the organizations goals, and work together as a team. In order to do this, they need to have an organized structure to be able to run the company smoothly. A main foundation of every organization is to post their mission statement and goals everywhere so that their employees can see them. An organizational culture can consist of common shared beliefs and values that are established by the organization’s leader, and then communicated and reinforce through various methods, this helps shape employee perceptions, behaviors and understanding. Overall, organizational structure and culture can effect progress of many organizations in a positive and negative way.

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,

Mergers and acquisitions have become a growing trend for companies to inorganically grow a business within its particular industry. There are many goals that companies may be looking to achieve by doing this, but the main reason is to guarantee long-term and profitable growth for their business. Companies have to keep up with a rapidly increasing global market and increased competition. With the struggle for competitive advantage becoming stronger and stronger, it is almost essential to achieve these mergers. Through research I will attempt to dissect the best practices for achieving merger success.

The goals of mergers range from reducing the number of competitors, to access of new products (Belcourt et al., p 330). Statistics show that 80% of new product developments fail (Howells, 2011), partly due to challenges and conflicts with human resources functions. Mergers and acquisitions are the fastest way to enter new markets. “It is estimated that 1/3 of all mergers fail due to faulty integration of diverse operations and cultures,” (Chhinzer, 2013). Therefore, the success of a merger or acquisition lies in the ability to guide, motivate, retain, and effectively use

Many organizations will either experience a merger or acquisition to try to absorb the costs during unstable market times. Mergers and acquisitions to employee’s usual mean staff reductions and major changes, especially for an acquisition which, is when another company purchases a company and becomes a new company. (McClure, 2016)

Every organization operates and functions in a different way. Rather it be the employees, the structure, or the products and services they provide, each organization will have their own unique way of performing tasks and reaching their goals. All organizations have a set of values and norms by which they go by, which sets them apart from other organizations. These values and norms are part of an organization’s culture. According to the textbook, organizational culture is “the set of shared values and norms that control organizational members’ interactions with each other and with suppliers, customers, and other people outside the organization” (pg. 179). Culture is one of the key ways an organization can increase its effectiveness. Organizational culture shapes and controls behavior within the organization. It influences how people respond to a situation and how they interpret the environment surrounding the organization. Therefore, an organization’s culture directly affects its performance and position within the competitive environment. With that being said, an organization with a well-established culture will tend to be more successful than an organization with a poor culture. Employees often spend 40 hours or more per week at their work place, which means organizational culture not only affects their work lives, but their personal lives as well. In attempt to better understand organizational culture, I will take a look at Chick-fil-A, a fast food restaurant

Even mergers and acquisitions with high combination potential were more successful with robust organizational integration efforts (Larsson & Finkelstein, 1999). Malhotra and Sharma (2013) mentions that financial gain is often the crux of the matter when merger and/or acquisitions are considered. Corporations hardly consider the impact on the employees and related human resources changes, issues or outcomes. People and indeed their compensation is mostly placed in a marginal position with most of the due diligence done around financial and strategic planning.

With the ever changing economy many companies today must evaluate strategies and practices to allow for optimum diversification and financial success. With the changing the marketplace organizations may turn to mergers and acquisitions to further diversify their business portfolio and expand their reach within the community. As organizations merge there are many variables that need to be considered, namely the employees which are the most important asset of both entities.

Intelligent, thoughtful people can form into organizations that are unproductive and ineffective in relation to their stated missions. This happens often and frequently, and there are many reasons why such a case can occur. This essay will discuss two possible reasons for such ineffectiveness and lack of productivity. Firstly, organizations may have an overall structure that is not conducive to success in relation to their mission. Secondly, the organizational culture affects the organization in such a negative way that the mission becomes clouded in the eyes of many employees and managers.

Businesses do not exist in a vacuum. It is hard to even imagine one that is completely isolated from external input. In fact, they are constantly subjected to influence from both the outside and the inside. In open systems, a relationship exists between a business and its surroundings in which awareness of that constant input and output is vital. In order for a startup company like Everyday Indulgence to move forward strategically and become successfully established, its leadership must identify and consider both internal and external environments.

“The factors that are most important in the creation of an organization’s culture include founders’ values, preferences, and industry demands.” - (Carpenter, M., Taylor, B., Erdogan, B. (2009))

Living in a world of approximately 7.5 billion people mean living with different perspectives, different ideas, different cultures; in other words, we live in a society full of diversities. Throughout this semester, I have learned that an organization cannot function without people. In fact, employees are one of the valuable assets of an organization. Every organization has a corporate culture; thus, living in a world of diversities poses the challenge for companies in maintaining such culture alive. I believe that organizational culture, just like Politics, cannot be avoided within an organization. I am not a mother yet, but based on my observation, organizational culture is like growing up a child that is, it requires of a strong mother (an empowered leader) to nurture a child (culture) with values and confidence which are key elements towards attaining success.

Organizational culture influences the working environment for employees and in healthcare organizations, the culture also effects patient outcomes. André, Sjøvold, Rannestad, & Ringdal, (2014) report, “researchers have also found that nurses working in contexts with more positive culture, leadership and evaluation reported more research utilization, staff development and lower rates of patients and staff adverse events” (p. 449). Therefore, it is important that health care organizations focus on establishing a positive culture. Research shows that positive work environments have similar characteristics. Nurse leaders are in an optimal position to influence organizational culture.

Mergers have become the way to go in the current climate of instability due to the recession. Since more and more companies are now showing the openness and eagerness towards mergers to enhance the business or to achieve stability, the issues associated with mergers are ever so under scrutiny than ever before.