Corporate culture continued

Extract of the chapter on Corporate Culture

What is corporate culture?”[1]

Culture in an organisation is basically composed of:

(a) Shared values: important concerns and goals that are shared by most of the people in a group, that tend to shape group behaviour, and that often persist over time even with changes in group memberships.

(b) Group behaviour norms: common or pervasive ways of acting that are found in a group and that persist because group members tend to behave in ways that teach these practices to new members, rewarding those that fit in and sanctioning those that do not.

Culture is thus a sum of values and practices that are shared across all groups in a firm, at least within senior management. Culture is also the result of a group of employees interacting over a significant period in time and be relatively successful at whatever they undertake. The longer the solutions seem to work, the more deeply they tend to become embedded in the culture.

E. Schein states that to get to the essence of a culture, it needs to be analysed at several levels:

1. Visible artefacts (such as branding[2])
2. Espoused beliefs, values, rules and behavioural norms
3. Tacit, taken for granted, basic underlying assumptions.

Kotter and Heskett[3]found it helpful to think of

organisational culture as having two levels, which differ in terms of their visibility and their resistance to change.

At a deeper and less visible level, culture refers to values that are shared by the

people in a group that tend to persist over time even when

group members change. These notions about what is important in life can vary deeply about money, in others about technological innovation or employee well-being. At this level culture can be extremely difficult to change, in part because group members are often unaware of many of the values that bind them together.

At the more visible level, culture represents the behaviour patterns or style

of an organisation that new employees are automatically encouraged to follow by their fellow employees. Culture in this sense is still tough to change, but nearly as difficult as at the level of basic values. Each level of culture has a natural tendency to influence the other.