CORPORATE CULTURE: What It Is and Why It Is Important
A functional corporate culture benefits both the company and its employees. In this article, the author provides an overview on the origin and concept of corporate culture and illustrates the change strategies organisations can deploy to move the current corporate culture to the desired one and achieve better organisational success.
As well as national culture there is also the powerful force called corporate culture. It is easiest defined as “the way we do things round here”. Many consultants will attest to the desire of senior managers to “change the corporate culture” which they perceive as causing poor productivity, engagement and turnover. How easy this is to do is another matter!
Anyone who has recently changed his or her job is acutely aware of the corporate culture whilst “old timers” have ceased to notice the oddities in the “usual behaviour around the office”.
Dysfunction in organisational culture can erode a business from within, causing it to lose its commercial edge and making it difficult to retain or recruit talent.
The culture dictates everything from dress code to timekeeping; email style to coffee-break etiquette; job titles to after-work behaviour. Corporate culture is often dramatically different from the pre- and pro-scribed behaviours in the mission statement or values declaration: what they say they believe and do is very different from what actually occurs.
More importantly,
