The Influence of Organizational Culture on Organizational Functionality

Throughout this essay organisational culture will be examined, including the two approaches mainstream and critical. What managers can do to shape culture and also an example of when culture has in fact been changed.

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.

Those that go into the business world quickly recognize that each work environment they find themselves in can be total different from another. This can especially be said even of environments within the United States, from region to region. There is definitely a disparity of workplace environments from country to country. Not only can culture drive a varied atmosphere, but the diversity of the personnel making up that environment can equally create a challenge that a leader must be prepared to manage. Recognizing that special care needs to be placed on communication and perception skills is crucial in our present professional domain. Managers of today need to employee tools from the psychological and sociological field to be successful. Having a deep understanding in the differences in culture and diversity in the workplace is critical, especially when debating about accepting a position overseas or assigning an employee to an embedded position abroad. With a broad knowledge of cultural differences and diversity, success as a manager and the stability of a positive work environment can be achieved and maintained without unnecessary effort and focus.

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,

Organisational Culture is defined as what the employees perceive and how this perception creates a pattern of beliefs, values and, expectations. Organisational culture differs from organizational climate. Climate refers to more temporary attitudes, feelings and perceptions of individuals (Schneider, 1990). Culture on the other hand is an enduring, slow to change, core characteristic of organisations which is an implicit often indiscernible aspects of organisations, climate refers to more overt, observable attributes of organisations.. Organisational culture is “the way things are” in the organisation rather that people’s transitory attitudes about them

Adaptability is a great advantage for a workplace for all who are connected to it. Companies where customer service is a significant aspect, flexibility gives the ability for the promotion of the workplace and for the association with customers. If there is the ability to do this and provide service to consumers in their culturally appropriate tongue, the array of customers allows for the comprehensive understanding of what is wanted. The presence various social and ethnic backgrounds in a workplace allows for this to happen (Greenberg 2013.) Another advantage of a culturally diverse workplace is the many different views on an issue that can be accessed. The immense assortment of viewpoints that people of different cultural backgrounds can have is astonishing. The effective resolution of matters can be made possible due to this, whether there are issues regarding general workplace administration, or even possible discriminatory concerns. Similarly, the overall productivity of organisations can benefit from a diverse workplace as well. Varied abilities allow for communication between

Globalisation is the process of exporting cultural identities to other nations from dominant cultures. The biggest challenge is to understand diverse behaviours of the managers try to be able to operate the business successfully in a foreign country. Diversity includes “all the characteristics and experience that define each of us as individuals” (Bovee & Thill, 2008, p. 61). The purpose of this essay is to

Managing a diverse workforce assists in creating a vivacious and assorted business team with opportunities and challenges for people of all aptitudes and experiences, besides host country nationals. In addition, by managing a diverse workforce assists in the facilitation of change in a country’s normal operating business practices. According to Hofstede’s dimensions of culture model, one could better understand the challenges faced by multinational managers in regards to human resource management, leadership style, motivational assumptions, decision-making, organizational design, and how culture can affect strategy implementation (Cullen & Parboteeah, 2014, p. 52). Furthermore, one can imagine how important manger actions and behavior are in educating future business leaders on how important it is to have a global mindset (“Social,” 2014). Lastly, although some consider the challenges mentioned obstacles, one could also consider finding opportunities in learning and progressing as a manager by being flexible and knowledgeable about different business possibilities and styles.

The face of business has been changing very rapidly from national to global environment over the years through technological advancements (McFarlin & Sweeney, 2013, p. 4). Emerging markets in developing countries continue to provide tremendous business opportunities for big corporations and multinational companies (McFarlin & Sweeney, 2003, pp. 5-6). Consequently, many business organizations have begun incorporating strategic measures in their operations to align with the changing demands of a diverse global market. They acknowledge the fact that modern business opportunities have grown beyond national walls. However, there is no absolute guarantee that setting up international business ventures will automatically lead to better financial performance of a firm. It comes with a challenge – the challenge of incorporating workforce diversity and managing it efficiently with a view to achieving steady growth in productivity, revenue and profitability. Recognizing the enormous challenges of cultural differences and ideologies in cross-national business environments, McLauren (2009) believes that diversity management “needs to be seen as the business plan, essential to successful products and increased sales. This is essentially true in today’s global

A great deal of research and reporting has gone into the emerging international movement known as globalization and the business ramifications of globalization has been reviewed and analyzed as the main focus of globalization. But management's pivotal need to develop smart strategies for the cross-cultural relationships that are inevitable vis-à-vis globalization has perhaps not been sufficiently explored in the literature. This paper focuses on how corporations, businesses and other organizations are going about or should be going about the correct approach to cross-cultural understanding and cooperation when it comes to globalization. A portion of this paper also will serve as a design using best practices in terms of meeting the challenges that globalization presents vis-à-vis cultural diversity.

Globalization has brought the world closer in communication, economics, politics, and especially business. The Internet and technological improvements have allowed instantaneous communication almost anywhere, and even poor women in India are using Smartphones to manage their banking portfolios. The idea of globalism continues to break down cultural barriers. As this continues it will be essential for organizations to not only understand, but embrace cultural differences and styles. Clearly, the changing demands of global stakeholders require new ways of approaching divergent customer bases. There are differences in style, skill, education and attitude in every organization now accentuated when we think of the multi-national organization. Correctly managed, this diversity can be a huge bonus to the organization (Trebing and Estabrooks, 2005). As we think of expanding Ikea into some of the major urban areas of China, there are a few issues that might be helpful in organizing training and strategic planning.

Globalization has blurred the boundaries between countries which forces the companies to compete internationally. In order to cope with the global market, international companies now require leaders who can work effectively across organizational, functional and cross cultural boundaries (Evans, Pucik & Barsoux, 2011). The need of those global leaders indicates the urgency of understanding cross cultural diversity.

Company X is an American-based organization that specializes in the research and development of specialty chemicals and equipment for applications in high tech industries. In addition, although Company X does license some manufacturing rights, it also produces many of its own specialty chemicals as well it all its equipment. Company Y is an Asian-based organization that specializes in monomers and polymers, that is, the base chemicals that are used in the development of Company X’s specialty chemicals. At this time, Company X is in the process of negotiating a merger with Company Y. The leaders of both organizations anticipate this merger will facilitate market benefits that will move the newly formed company to the next platform of success in several markets. One particular benefit will be the entry of the products produced by Company X into the Asian market. However, for the merger to be successful the leaders of Company X and Company Y realize that issues surrounding organizational behaviors must be overcome.

Many opportunities are associated with a culturally diverse workplace and global expansion may have potential to provide just such a diverse work group. Cross-culturalism in business can provide leaders and employees with a wonderful opportunity to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. In addition, “the more opportunities for business leaders to interact with people from different cultures, the more likely they will be to have positive attitudes from different cultures and identify, learn and apply diverse culturally-appropriate business behaviors” (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012, p. 614). Culturally diverse environments offer a multitude of benefits including “the variety of perspectives, skills and personal attributes” (Matveeve & Nelson, 2004, p. 254). Moreover, multicultural teams have potential to “generate more ideas of higher quality in brainstorming tasks” (Matveeve &

Cross-cultural management is the subject field management in a cross-cultural context. Cross-cultural management takes place when a manager handles someone from a different cultural background. This challenge in management is very common as businesses expand globally, hiring immigrants and work to increase diversity. It includes the study of the influence of societal cultivation on top management practices. Organizing a business in a diverse culture environment can be challenging but it is not something that cannot be achieved. Nowadays, some organizations have started special awareness programs in cross-cultural management so that they can work with less cultural issues and embrace the benefits that they gain from cross cultural management. However, there are many still fail to understand the importance of bringing individuals from diverse backgrounds together. Most managers think that by implementing such programs are just waste of time and resources.