Understanding Corporate Culture: Importance, Characteristics, and Examples

RUNNING HEADER: Organizational development
The corporate culture
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RUNNING HEADER: Organizational development
The corporate culture
Abstract
The company executives requires to properly evaluate, identify, and influence the
organization culture in order to enable corporate agility and high financial success. As a
prospective potential worker in an organization, understanding the true culture of the firm
will ensure that one makes an informed decision on whether the firm meets the requirements.
This will contribute to the high standards set for employees to flourish professionally
(Alvesson & Berg, 2011). Corporate culture has gross and subtle manifestations that arise to
give clues about the underlying norms, values, and beliefs. The key participants should pay
attention to the conducive work environment, communication channels, and humor level in
an organization so as to offer a detailed hint of the dominant company culture. Proper
identification and understanding of such aspects are significant as they affect large-scale
changes and alternatives in response to target market imperatives.
Introduction
Basically, corporate culture is the personality of a company: the individual or group
values, perceptions, behavioral characteristics and shared beliefs. It is symbolic, holistic and
stable in nature.
This involves the beliefs and behaviors that indicate how an organization's employees
and top management interact and enable outside important business transactions to be carried
out. Mostly corporate culture develops periodically and comprehensively over time as a result
of various cumulative traits of the employees that the firm hires (Cameron & Quinn,2011). A
company culture will be determined by through different workers dress code, business hours,
office layout, worker's benefits, turnover ratio, hiring informed decisions and customer
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RUNNING HEADER: Organizational development
treatment and overall satisfaction. It has effects on every aspect of the company activities and
level of operations.
The history of corporate culture
Increased awareness of corporate or company culture in various set of business
operations and other organization activities started in the 1960s. During this entire period,
corporate culture was utilized by top managers, sociologists and philosophers to evaluate the
overall character of a given organization in a company setting. The example of this aspect
included participant's behaviors and beliefs, firm value systems, top management strategies,
worker communication and interaction, a conducive working environment, perception and
attitude of employees existing in the entire company (Denison,1990).Corporate culture would
later develop its domain to also include the charisma of Chief executive officers and company
symbols representing logos and trademarks of the firm's products in the target market.
Corporate culture was not only created by management and workers of a firm but also
affected by state cultures and people traditions, current economic trends, international trade,
organization size and the goods its dealing with. There exist several terms that influence
organizations impacted by several cultures especially in the period of rising globalization and
the increased country to a country interaction of the modern business environment. In such
perspective corporate culture involves the positive interaction of individuals from distinct
backgrounds in the business world (Eccles,Ioannou & Serafeim, 2012). There exists culture
shock which basically describes the increased anxiety of an individual's experience during
carrying out business activities in a society other than their own. In order to conduct a great
cross-culture experience and facilitation of a more comprehensive and productive corporate
culture, organizations have in-depth resources to counter such occurrences. This includes
detail special training strategies that improve cross-culture business enterprise interactions.
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