Corporate culture

In six words, corporate culture is "How we do things around here."

Corporate culture is the collective behavior of people using common corporate vision, goals, shared values, beliefs, habits, working language, systems, and symbols. It is interwoven with processes, technologies, learning and significant events. In addition, different individuals bring to the workplace their own uniqueness, knowledge, and ethnic culture. So corporate culture encompasses moral, social, and behavioral norms of your organization based on the values, beliefs, attitudes, and priorities of its members.

Corporate culture can be transformed, but leadership to sustain anything that sweeping has to come from "the top."

Adaptive Cultures

Your corporate culture is good only if it fits its context, i.e. your business space and your business strategy. In today's rapidly changing economy, "only cultures that can help organizations anticipate and adapt to environmental change will be associated with superior performance over the long time."⁸ Research findings¹⁰ show that cultures that are externally oriented (e.g. risk taking, readiness to meet new challenges) tend to be more strongly associated with organizational performance (operationalized using a range of measures) than do those cultures which are bureaucratic and predominantly internally focused.

Corporate Culture: The Three Levels

The three levels of a corporate culture are

1. Surface Level: At this level, culture is both enacted and reinforced through visible appearances and behaviors, such as physical layouts, dress codes, organizational structure, company policies, procedures and programs, and attitudes.

2. Middle Level: Here, culture is manifested through our beliefs and values.

3. Deepest Level: At this level, culture is manifested through basic assumptions – our long-learned, automatic responses and established opinions.

by Priti Shah

Laurent & Benon Management Consultants Ltd