Corporate culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Corporate culture - Essay Example The goal of the essay is to identify what parts of culture are the most important and why it is useful for managers in order to build a worthwhile long-term corporate strategy and keep competitive edge. Here will be described power, diverse attitudes and beliefs, how to effectively manage people, risk and socialisation. The corporate culture There are several success factors for business if the organisation desires to achieve growth and build high human capital development. First, leadership needs to have a very strong vision of what they want to accomplish. â€Å"They know how to set the direction for the organisation and how to build commitment to follow that direction† (DeVries, 1996, p.491). It is necessary for managers to be transformational, using positive personality and charismatic traits, in order to get employees to model themselves after the leader. They need to push for personal growth and add more value to the human resources role to gain this commitment. However, this cannot be done without setting a cultural tone within the business that provides opportunities for employees to be empowered. If the manager considers culture important, they will develop proper training for this effort and always reinforce how important it is for employees to be focused on mission-related goals. ... Managers should not always keep power at the top levels since this breaks down the effectiveness of attempting to build a positive, unified corporate culture. â€Å"If power lies in the strategic coordination of resources rather than mere possession of them, then a strategic conception of power offers the opportunity for subordinate groups to develop coalitions capable of challenging dominant groups† (Alvesson & Willmott, 2003, p.6). If this is true, then employees will work against senior-level power and control and try to combat it by developing their own factions as they try to gain control in certain key areas. If power only resides at the top layers of the business leadership, then it is not a true culture. It is, instead, a business that maintains very high controls and does not provide workers with much flexibility or give them perceptions of value. A business that operates in this condition would be referred to as a centralised organisation dedicated only to making sur e employees perform as they are expected. Social and psychological factors are dismissed in this type of business and no culture exists at all, only one with a Theory X type of focus where employees are always regulated. This could lead to higher turnover rates or generally dissatisfied employee groups who have little to contribute to a cultural whole. In some business environments overseas, such as Saudi Arabia, managers score high on testing related to Hofstede’s power distance scale. This is due to Muslim beliefs that are traditionalist and are common in Islamic societies (Bjerke & Al-Meer, 1993). Power distance is the level of closeness between management and regular employees.