Organisational Culture: Various Aspects

Organizational Cultures -By Pranav Kumar Verma Any organization has a key factor to go ahead in the competency it faces. The major building block of an organization is the core culture of the organization itself. This is the reason why someone would like to enjoy a work environment even when a little bit of other aspects are not according to the person. A comfortable organization culture provides a minimum comfort level to the employees of the firm. As per definition, a corporate culture is the shared beliefs, values, ideologies, expectations and norms of the organization. Any organization culture develops over a period of time and hence it is very difficult to change it in a very short time. This is what happened when Lenovo took over the Thinkpad division of IBM. According to the Wall Street Journal on November 5th, 2008, the CEO of the company, Bill Amelio, and chairman Yang Yanquing, had been having culture clashes. On a personal note, this could be a lapse in the thought when a Chinese company decided to acquire an American company. Any such architecture can bring in a problem which I would personally term as skip level reporting. This is a scenario I have seen when a person is more comfortable with the skip level in the hierarchy. This creates a problem with him and his immediate superior. And culture does play an important role in creating this kind of comfort level. According to Robbins, the culture of the company is majorly formed by the philosophy of the founder of the firm and the ideologies of the top management. This mixed with the socialization process gives the final organization culture as an output. This kind of corporate culture is fine as long as the company is working on its own, but the major problem arises when the company goes into a merger or an acquisition. Here the top management of both the companies merges. Since they have different ideologies, the problems start propping up. This is what happened when L’Oreal acquired Body Shop.