Organisation culture

During the last two decades the world has seen a sharp increase in the number of multinational companies. The 21st century has seen Internationalisation‘ become the primary strategy for companies which intend to expand their business from one nation to another according to a recent Business Week‘ article, Chief Executive Officers are being driven by a simple truth: to survive is to be global‘ ‖. Globalization has brought in an influx of cultural identities at the workplace. The influence of national culture impacts the workplace but global companies have generally ignored the nuances of national culture and its significance to an individual‘s behavior. Instead they have employed policies which aim at urging high performance from their employees while the existence of intercultural misunderstandings has been an impediment to such performance.

As people from different cultural groups take on the exciting challenge of working together, cultural values sometimes conflict. We can misunderstand each other, and react in ways that can hinder what are otherwise promising partnerships. Oftentimes, we aren’t aware that culture is acting upon us. Sometimes, we are not even aware that we have cultural values or assumptions that are different from others!‖ This conflict of culture has been confirmed by Hofstede (A Duetch Professor) who state, ―When people are interacting with each other across cultures, their cultural values could make them say or do things that are misperceived as intentional.

The cultural problems associated with cultural diversities at the workplace can also be associated with a divergence between the employees‘ local national culture and the company‘s alien‘ corporate culture. Thus, in different environments, employees strive to carry out their duties within the guidelines of the companies‘ corporate cultures which have originated in specific environments while they are under the influence of their own unique national cultures. The average individual is influenced by their national culture in which they have been so moulded by growing up and adjusting to it.

First we have to understand the terms organizational or corporate culture and local national culture. Organizational culture is essentially the personality of an organisation. Culture is comprised of the assumptions, values, norms, and tangible signs (artifacts) of organization members and their behaviors ). Members of an organisation soon come to sense the particular culture of that organisation. Culture is one of those terms that are difficult to express distinctly, but everyone knows it when they sense it . You can tell the culture of an organisation by looking at the arrangement of furniture, what dominates their conversations, what employees wear, etc. -- similar to what you can use to get a feeling about someone’s personality .

Corporate culture can be looked at as a system. Inputs include feedback from, for example, society, professions, laws, stories, heroes, values on competition or service, etc. The process is based on our assumptions, values, and norms, e.g.,

our values on money, time, facilities, space and people. Outputs or effects of our culture are, for example organisational behaviors, technologies, strategies, image, products, services, appearance, etc .

The concept of organizational culture is particularly important when attempting to manage organisation-wide change. Practitioners are coming to realize that, despite the best-laid plans, organisational change must include not only changing structures and processes, but changing the corporate culture as well

There has been a great deal of research generated over the past decade about the concept of organisational culture, particularly in regard to learning how to change organisational culture. Organisational change efforts are rumoured to fail the vast majority of the time. Usually, this failure is credited to a lack of understanding about the strong role of organizational culture and the role it plays in organisations. That is one of the reasons why a number of strategic planners now place as much emphasis on identifying strategic values as they do mission and vision.

However the influence of local culture and its impact at the work place where an organisational or corporate culture is already in place has been largely ignored by companies venturing into the internationalization of their business. This critical factor which plays an important role in the firm‘s international performance and expansion is largely overlooked. To gain a comprehensive understanding of this important issue extensive empirical research and theory development have been carried out by many international business researchers . Limited research has been done in the area of an American corporate organization establishing itself into the Middle Eastern Arab culture and successfully integrating and expanding their business .