Corporate Culture Fundamentals

Where Does Culture Reside? Culture is a property of a group.
Whenever a group has enough common experience, a culture
begins to form. One finds cultures at the level of small teams,
families, and work groups. Cultures are found at every
hierarchical level. Culture exists at the level of the whole
organization if there is sufficient shared history. That is why
understanding of corporate or organizational culture becomes an
integral part of the understanding of the organization itself.
 
It is even found at the level of a whole industry because of
the shared occupational backgrounds of the people
industry-wide. Finally, culture exists at the level of regions and
nations because of common language, ethnic background,
religion, and shared experience. But if you spend the bulk of
your life in a given occupation and organization, you not only
take on many of the cultural themes that others in the
occupation or organization share, but they can very well be well
formed assumptions and may elude your awareness. And there
lies the real power of culture, this unconscious quality for sure!!
 
You are not aware of your cultural biases until someone
challenges them or until you have offended someone with a
different cultural background. Having thought broadly about
culture, it is now time to think more precisely about how to
define culture, how to assess it, and how to begin to evolve it.
 
Questions to be pondered upon
As you begin to think about culture, think about it first in your
own personality:
Review your family, ethnic, national, and educational
background to identify the major influences on your current
values and ways of doing things.
Review your current formal and informal group affiliations to
identify what current norms and values matter to you.
Think about your place of work, its history, and traditions
and see how that relates to your own values and ways of
doing things.
 
The discussion here is directed towards undergraduate as well
as postgraduate students, academics and practitioners interested
in corporate culture and the changes in leadership, management
consultancy, corporate culture. The discussion in the subsequent
sections here is to investigate and discuss a range of questions
such as:
How do managers, consultants and HRM people work with
cultural change projects? How do they design and execute
such projects? How do they think, get information and follow
up their work? Is there a set of shared meanings making
coordinated work possible or are there varieties of
interpretations and meanings among those engaged in the
change work producing difficulties? ?
What is happening in terms of processes? Are the intentions
of the design of change projects realized in the
implementation events? Are instruments of change used as
intended? How do those involved in these processes, for
example the managers and employees seen as the recipients
and carriers of change initiatives, make sense of this and
what do they do?
What are the outcomes in terms of responses and
consequences? Is it possible that changes those initially
intended or are the consequences unforeseen? If there are
no changes, how can this be understood?
What can be learned about culture change projects and
other forms of organizational changes? What are the traps
and problems? What do managers, consultants, HRM people
and other people involved need to consider in planning,
designing, executing and learning from such projects?