Premium Essay

The Connection Between National Culture and Organizational Culture

In: Business and Management

Submitted By 71861maricosta
Words 2714
Pages 11
The Connection between National Culture and Organizational Culture Kyb Fugfugosh San Francisco State University IBUS 681 (01) Date 12/10/2012

2 The Connection between National and Organizational Culture The term “culture” is generally ascribed to societies in a country, or ethnic and regional clusters within a nation, but can also be assigned to organizations, institutions, and family. Social organizations, whether national cultures, or institutional cultures develop because members’ behavior is not arbitrary, and can sometimes be anticipated and calculated. Organizations are bound by culture, which includes the individual behaviors of members and the collective purpose of the organization. In his frequently referenced book, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-related Values (1984), Geert Hofstede provided a methodology for the cross-cultural studies of nations, and the organizations that develop based on cultural values. Cultural concepts, as they relate to organizational studies, are borrowed from anthropology, in which views vary, and there is no consensus. Therefore the application of the “cultural perspective” to organizational studies also varies, and is based on assumptions about the nature of both “culture” and “organizations” (Smircich, 1983). Pettigrew (1979) advocated the use of cultural concepts borrowed from sociology and anthropology in the examination of organizational behavior. He advanced “longitudinalprocessual” studies of organizations that acknowledged the possibility of long-term analysis of institutions as entities within societies, which also have pasts, presents, and futures (Pettigrew, 1979, p. 570). Organizations, like nations consist of people from various socio-economic backgrounds, and often from different cultures, as do multinational and international institutions. Each individual possesses “mental programs”

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Human Service Organization and Analysis

...National, State, and Local Human Service Organizational Structures and Processes Summary National, State, and Local Human Service Organizational Structures and Processes Summary Team A selected three organizations to analyze and understand their organizational structures and processes, and also to compare and contrast their similarities and differences. The organizations selected include the Red Cross, Arizona Child Protective Services, and Native Connections. Each organization will be examined for their organizational structure and whether the organization is governmental, private, for-profit, or nonprofit. The paper will analyze the departments, divisions, or specific areas of program delivery and how the organization builds community. How building community affects the value of the organization will also be discussed. The organizational culture will be examined and why the culture is important to the organization. The Blake and McCanse’s Leadership Grid and Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model will be related to the each organization’s human relations model. A relevant strategic plan or organizational chart for each organization will be examined and a summary will be given of the differences between the national, state, and county or local human service organizations selected. Organizational Structure Organizational structure defines how the organization is arranged and operates (Lewis, Packard, Lewis, 2007). The Red Cross is structured in a combination...

Words: 2257 - Pages: 10

Premium Essay

Leadership and National Culture

...One of the topics that exist since ancient times are leadership, national culture and organizational culture because every nation and country have their culture and need their leaders. Some of the leaders are better than others and because of this reason they manage to govern their countries better and to win advantage for them. Like every country the companies all over the world have their organizational cultures and their leaders. Every company is trying to shape its organizational culture striving to reach its personal goals and because some are better than others they have better products and bigger market shares. The first purpose of this paper is to present the old organizational culture, the old values and leadership style of Ford and how they affected the performance of the company. The second goal of the paper is to show why the need for change came in Ford and how they managed to implement this change into practice. Organisational culture, Leadership and Leadership Style – Definitions One of the possible definitions for organisational culture that exists is as follow: Organisational culture is “the set of shared values, beliefs and norms that influences the way employees think, feel and behave toward each other and toward people outside the organization” (George and Jones, 2012). One of the aspects which are considered in this paper and which is aspect of organisational culture is organizational structure. It can be described as “the pattern of relationships among...

Words: 3208 - Pages: 13

Premium Essay

Aiwai

...Organization Culture August 19, 2009 Group 4 Organizational Culture Introduction Basically, organizational culture is the personality of the organization. Culture is comprised of the assumptions, values, norms and tangible signs (artifacts) of organization’s members and their behaviors. Members of an organization soon come to sense the particular culture of an organization. Culture is one of those terms that are difficult to express distinctly, but everyone knows it when they sense it. For example, the culture of a large, profit corporation is quite different than that of a hospital which is quite different than that of a university. You can tell the culture of an organization by looking at the arrangement of furniture, what they brag about, what members 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, e.g., 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, e.g., organizational behaviors, technologies, strategies, image, products, services, appearance, etc. The concept of culture is particularly important when attempting to manage organization-wide change. Practitioners are coming to realize that, despite the best-laid plans, organizational change must include...

Words: 3225 - Pages: 13

Premium Essay

Jnjn

...ENGINEERING DECISIONS Organizational Culture Types as Predictors of Corporate Social Responsibility* Ülle Übius, Ruth Alas Estonian Business School, Estonia, Tallinn 10114, Lauteri 3 The purpose of this paper is to investigate connections between corporate social responsibility and organizational culture types. The survey was conducted in Estonian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Czech, Finnish, German and Slovakian electric-electronic machine, retail store and machine-building enterprises. The main aim of the study is to find connections between corporate social responsibility and different organizational culture types. According to Cameron and Quinn (1998), culture defines the core values, assumptions, interpretations and approaches that characterise an organization. Competing Values Framework is extremely useful in helping to organize and interpret a wide variety of organizational phenomena. The four dominant culture types – hierarchy, market, clan and adhocracy emerge from the framework. According to Strautmanis (2007), social responsibility is part of organizational culture and a value in the organizational culture environment. Development of social responsibility is a change in values orientation, whose task is shaping the attitudes, transformation of the personal position so that it matches individual and public interests. Different organizations have framed different definitions about corporate social responsibility - although there is considerable common ground between them. Nowadays...

Words: 7939 - Pages: 32

Premium Essay

Connection, Value, and Growth: How Employees with Different National Identities Experience a Geocentric Organizational Culture of a Global Corporation

...http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhrd20 Connection, value, and growth: how employees with different national identities experience a geocentric organizational culture of a global corporation Maria S. Plakhotnik, Tonette S. Rocco, Joshua C. Collins & Hilary Landorf To cite this article: Maria S. Plakhotnik, Tonette S. Rocco, Joshua C. Collins & Hilary Landorf (2015) Connection, value, and growth: how employees with different national identities experience a geocentric organizational culture of a global corporation, Human Resource Development International, 18:1, 39-57, DOI: 10.1080/13678868.2014.979009 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2014.979009 Published online: 11 Dec 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 288 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rhrd20 Download by: [University of Exeter] Date: 12 December 2015, At: 14:41 Human Resource Development International, 2015 Vol. 18, No. 1, 39–57, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2014.979009 Connection, value, and growth: how employees with different national identities experience a geocentric organizational culture of a global corporation Maria S. Plakhotnika, Tonette S. Roccob*, Joshua C. Collinsb and Hilary Landorf c School of Social Sciences and the Humanities, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”...

Words: 10166 - Pages: 41

Premium Essay

The Role of National Culture on Leadership

...Executive Summary The aim for this thesis is to answer the problem statement: How do national cultures influence leadership styles? To give an answer to this question, this thesis is divided into three parts: leadership, national culture and the connection between them. The conclusion of this thesis is based on analytical and exploratory research. The first part, on leadership, focuses on mainly two types of leadership: transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership is mainly based on the transaction between leaders and their followers. Bass described four components of transactional leadership: Contingent reward, Active management by exception, Passive management by exception and Laissez-Faire leadership (1997). Transformational leadership focuses mainly on inspiring and stimulating the followers. Transformational leadership contains also four components: Idealized influence (Charisma), Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation and Individualized consideration. The second part focuses on different studies on national culture: Hofstede (1983), Schwartz (1990) and Inglehart (1997). Each study has different values and dimensions, both all three studies show some similarities. The first similar dimension contains: Hofstede’s Power distance, Schwartz’ Hierarchy versus Egalitarianism and Inglehart’s Survival and measures the degree to which the people in a national culture accept and expect the unequal distribution of power. The second similar dimension...

Words: 8555 - Pages: 35

Premium Essay

Factors of Communication

...Communication Everything we do at work environment involves communication. Communication is about the transferring of information that leads to an understanding. Communication in organisation occurs in many forms, face to face communication or written communication. Communication in organisation can be seen from two perspectives. Interpersonal communication and organisational communication. (Robbin and Coulter 2013) Interpersonal communication This involves communication between two or more people. Interpersonal communication is an interactive process of sending and receiving verbal and non-verbal messages that eventually results in understanding of meanings. (Robbin and Coulter 2013) Communication process Communication involves the following elements: sender, message, encoding, channel, receiver, decoding, feedback and noise. Before communication can take place, a purpose, expressed as a message to be conveyed, is needed. It pass message by encoding a thought. The message is then encoded and passed by way of some medium to the receiver. Message is the actual physical product from the source encoding. When we speak, the speech is the message. When we write, the writing is the message. When we gesture, the movements of our arms and expressions on surfaces are message. Encoding the message means convert to a symbolic form by senders. The skills, attitudes and the knowledge of the sender influence the encoding of message. The channel is the medium...

Words: 2320 - Pages: 10

Free Essay

Organizational Culture

...paper examines the growing phenomenon of organizational culture. What is it? Why is it important? How has it changed and why? How can an organization establish or change their culture? I hope to answer all of these questions and leave people with a better understanding of the concept and what factors create a strong organizational culture in today’s workforce. What is Organizational Culture? Organizational culture is not a new concept. It has been in existence since the emergence of the business world. However, it is only relatively recently that it has been identified, and executives have taken notice and made it a priority. The culture of an organization can be compared to the personality of a human being (Chegini, 2010). Culture is the essence of what an organization represents, who they are, what they stand for, what they believe in, and what is important to them. One of the better, and simpler, definitions of organizational culture I found is “the shared values and assumptions that guide behavior in an organization” (Çakar, 2010). The fundamentals of corporate culture can include a company’s values, employee expectations, customs, factual or mythical organizational history, language, climate, etc. In some cases, organizational culture is designed and employees are encouraged and expected to achieve it. On the other hand, culture may also develop over time from the attitudes and mentalities of employees. An organizational vision and mission statement may also...

Words: 3663 - Pages: 15

Free Essay

Shein Case Study

...QUESTION 1 What are the basic assumptions within the organization? In this case study, I have chosen Top Glove Company as my observation. This company established in Malaysia. The chairman of this company is a Chinese people but being working with other religion to achieve their goals. Top Glove Company has doing worldwide market by exporting their products over 195 countries in the world. When doing exporting, they must entered many countries and each country have their own cultural applied when conducting their business. Within Malaysia, maybe the cultural are almost the same but when we talk about worldwide everything must be wide open. According to Shein, he said that organizational culture definitions are one of a pattern of basic assumptions. Generally, cultural assumptions must have to do with internal workings of an organization and how the organization sees itself in relation to its environment. In Top Glove Company, I had made assumption that the objective of this company apply is more concern about the quality of the products and services. Their vision is “We strive to be the world’s leading manufacturer with excellent quality glove products and services that enrich and protect human lives.” This means that this company has meet the cultural context which is survive in the external environment by making their products environmental friendly. The mission of this company is “To be a world class glove manufacturer providing top quality products with excellent...

Words: 1528 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Cultural Framework

...Fons Trompenaars. I - Introduction Different national cultures comprise different cultural value systems. The value systems are generated from a conception, or as noted previous beliefs, of existing means or resources, and necessities. Cultures have various standards and some factors such as behaviors, traditions or communication of one culture can be observed as irrelevant or sometimes even threatening by other cultures. These uncertainties can bring into being cultural gaps between people within a workforce. Not only do the variety of cultural structure interacting together increase the potential for conflict or disagreement, but also methods of control disputation among the cultures. The project manager must be able to handleconfrontation using different styles, depending on the circumstances, in order to effectively manage a diverse team. This paper discusses the most well-known and accepted theories of cultural differences and illustrates them with cases from international project management. Two leading studies of cross-cultural management have been conducted by Geert Hofstede and FonsTrompenaars. Both frameworksoffer a set of cultural dimensions along which core values can be obtained. These structures influence on human thinking, feeling, performance, and the behavior of organizations and institutions in predictable practice. The two sets of measurements indicate basic difficulties that any culture has to deal with but for which solutions are in dispute...

Words: 2552 - Pages: 11

Premium Essay

Culture Identity and Organization

...Section 1 Organizational Culture: set of artifacts, values and assumption that emerge from the interaction of organizational members Open social system operating a dynamic environment. CRITERIA to identify something as culture: 1. Deeply felt or held 2. Commonly intelligible 1. Accessible to a cultural group  Organization = Ordered and purposeful interaction among people. Purposeful, because its members produce (supero-rdinative) goal-directed activities. Organizational communication is a continuous process through which organizational members create, maintain and change the organization. (it includes business communication) N.B. All organizational members take place in it; messages are produced to create a shared meaning of messages, but it is not always achieved. Those messages vary in form according to various factors (power distances, roles, goal, method, non-verbal), and to be fully understood have to be considered in their contexts   Culture: "the collective programming if the mind that DISTINGUISHES the members of one group tor category of people from another" (Hofstede 2001) Is both a process and a product; is confining (imitates groups) and facilitating (gives us a way to better understand what is happening) Cultural Symbol = physical indicators of organizational life (Rafaeli & Worline 2000)   ARTIFACTS: visible/tangible, are also part of them norms, standards, customs and social convention. Norms: pattern of behaviors or communication...

Words: 18112 - Pages: 73

Premium Essay

Link Between Emotional Intelligence and Cross-Cultural Leadership

...Reilly, A.H. and Karounos, T.J. (2009), “Exploring the Link between Emotional Intelligence and Cross-Cultural Leadership Effectiveness”, Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 1 – 13. Introduction Along with the globalization of business, many corporations are facing the challenge of operating in a different culture. The writers made a connection between emotional intelligence and cross-cultural leadership effectiveness to deal with this situation, this article also presented some significant results and implications which were greatly helpful for our company. This report is aimed at review the article and pick out something useful to raise staff awareness of cross-cultural issues. In this paper, I will summarize the key point of the article and evaluate some correlative information which can be applied to our company, then there will be a conclusion at the end of the report and two related references will also be given as well. Summary Reilly and Karounos (2009) exhibited Goleman’s research to identify the connection between emotional intelligence and leadership ability. Goleman (1998) claimed that the importance of emotional intelligence on the overall leaderships in organization is twice greater than the other two personal capabilities, technical skills and cognitive skill. The article showed the five components of emotional intelligence and their respective characteristics listed by Goleman (1998), which are exhibited on a...

Words: 1039 - Pages: 5

Premium Essay

The Role of Cultures in Global Management

...The Role of Cultures in Global Management   Abstract What is culture and how other people deal with culture on a daily basis. Countries around the world work daily with different cultures in a business setting. There are many different ways that culture practices get done throughout the world. Middle East does things different than what the United States does. Global management and cultures bring many issues with it. Managers and staff need to find new ways to handle values, beliefs and social norms when working a business around the world. Most businesses have an assortment of different cultures and backgrounds because there are different people working within the group. This “Group of people" has the same religion, language, beliefs, and values share a culture no matter what. This, in turn, joined with all different types of people in the same cultural system. An examination made of the art of administering groups who are from different cultures, taking into account their different set of values, carry out, and ways of achieving different goals. A review presented of some of the problems that inherent in from one country to another because manager reject or is helpless of internalizing the local culture in which the displacement operates. Culture provides two functions that affect global management today. With the growth in global activities of both domestic and multinational companies, managers need a good perceptive of culture. People’s cultural...

Words: 2263 - Pages: 10

Premium Essay

Creating and Strengthening Organizational Culture: the Experience of Digi Malaysia

...collectivism Masculinity versus feminity Uncertainty Avoidance Conclusion Citation INTRODUCTION Culture is a global phenomenon that derived from social, economic, legal, political and religious norms, values and traditions of the society. Culture shapes the behavior of individuals to act accordingly in different situations faced by the individuals in all spheres of life. An organizational culture is commonly defined as a set of beliefs, values and assumptions that are shared by members of an organization (Schein, 1985). In both personal and organizational level, it is believed that organizational culture provides a competitive advantage and has a considerable effect in developing employee–manager relationship. The influence of organizational culture on organizational performance has been proven in many studies. For example, a number of researchers (e.g., Paparone, 2003; Smith and Shilbury, 2004; Ezirim et al., 2010) have addressed the significant roles of creating, managing, and changing organizational culture for the purpose of increasing overall organizational effectiveness and performance. Hence, creating and strengthening of organization culture of a company is a very important process in ensuring company continual success. In this study, the organizational culture of Digi Malaysia was studied using Hofstede’s organizational dimensions. Digi Malaysia is third largest phone service provider in Malaysia after Maxis and Celcom. Being one of three...

Words: 2972 - Pages: 12

Premium Essay

Starbucks Towards National Culture

...1.0 Introduction This paper will be discussed about defining culture in organization according to the Schein’s definition. The Schein’s theory is include of the (a) a pattern of basic assumptions, (b) invented, discovered, or developed by a given group, (c)as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, (d) that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore (e) is to be taught to new members as the (f) correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to chosen problems’.(Schein, 1990, 111). So by this all theory will be discuss about the theory in the organization or the company I had been choose to study how much this theory will be applied toward the organization or the company. The company that I had been choose is Starbuck company that selling the drink and beverage toward people. The other reason I choose Starbucks is because it has worldwide branch including Malaysia. So that it must adapt it certain culture in the nation in order to survive. Starbucks also including the best company in the world that because of it successes to expand the company to the whole worldwide. In term of management Starbucks also has the best management in the world. According to the Fortune.com Starbucks get a ranking no 5 world for the most admired company so far. By this I will related the Schein’s theory toward this company and how it functioning. 2.0 Problem statement 2.1 What are the basic assumptions within the organization...

Words: 2009 - Pages: 9