Wesfarmers Limited: Corporate Culture and Organizational Success

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MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATIONS IN A
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
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Executive Summary
Wesfarmers Limited is an Australia-based company engaged in retailing, coal mining, fertilizers,
industrial and safety products; and chemicals. Every organization has a different organizational
culture that assists significantly in the success of an organization. The organization culture
involves the values, principles, beliefs as well as the ideologies of the organization. The work
includes the assessment of the significance of corporate culture for organizational success.
Development of an organization’s culture involves the consideration of certain dimensions. It
further discusses those dimensions that are utilized for the purpose of establishing an
organizational culture.
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The significance of Corporate Culture
The culture in organization unifies all the employees for the achievement of a common goal.
These employees belong to different backgrounds, race, religion, and education and the culture
brings them together. It helps in the promotion of healthy competition within the organization
that enhances employee productivity. Somewhere, the culture assists in developing a positive
brand image of a company (Husseinali, et. al., 2017). Also, the organizational culture helps in
directing the employees regarding the interaction with co-employees and customers and others.
In this way, corporate culture plays a significant role in the success of an organization.
Dimensions of an Organizational Culture
There are significant dimensions that are utilized for developing an organizational culture such
as innovation, risk-taking, and social responsibility. It can be seen that the culture of Wesfarmers
highly emphasizes on innovation by providing the employees a certain degree of autonomy and a
feeling of ownership. Apart from this, innovation can be realized in the company’s reward
system where good performers are rewarded and poor performers have to deal with the
consequences (Odor, 2018). The employees are given opportunities for the purpose of
discovering new products or services. The risk-taking dimension in Wesfarmers exists as it
follows a procedure regarding the implementation of risk culture. The company challenges the
status quo of the employees while providing a safe environment for the risk-takers. Following
this, the company considers the successes and failures in such risk-taking culture and depicts
learning from these events. Social responsibility is a crucial aspect of organizational culture that
is highly considered by Wesfarmers (Wesfarmers, 2018). Under this aspect, the company makes
efforts to make employees aware of the charitable and other environmental initiatives taken by
the company. It is evident with the initiatives such as offering safe and healthy workplace;
provide safe products to local communities, product sourcing responsibly along with making
efforts for reducing emissions and wastage.
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References
 Husseinali, H., Said, R. M., Abdullah, A. and Daud, Z. M. (2017). THE IMPACT OF
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE ON CORPORATE FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE:
A REVIEW. International Journal of Economics, Commerce and Management, V(8).
 Odor, H. (2018). Organisational Culture and Dynamics. International Journal of
Scientific Research and Management (IJSRM), 6(1).
 Wesfarmers, (2018). WESFARMERS SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2018. [Online]
Wesfarmers. Available at: https://sustainability.wesfarmers.com.au/ [Accessed on 17th
January 2019].
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