Cognitive mapping the topic of corporate culture

Cognitive mapping the topic of corporate culture

Joseph Kim-keung Ho

Independent Trainer

Hong Kong, China

Abstract: The topic of corporate culture in the subject of Business Management is complex. By making use of the cognitive mapping technique to conduct a brief literature review on the corporate culture topic, the writer renders a systemic image on the topic of corporate culture. The result of the study, in the form of a cognitive map on corporate culture, should be useful to those who are interested in the topics of cognitive mapping, literature review and corporate culture.

Key words: Corporate culture, cognitive mapping, literature review

Introduction

As a topic in Business Management, corporate culture is complex. It is thus useful to employ some learning tool to conduct its study, notably for literature review purpose. For a teacher in research methods, systems thinking and management, the writer is specifically interested in finding out how the cognitive mapping technique can be employed to go through a literature review on  corporate culture. This literature review exercise is taken up and reported in this article.

On the cognitive mapping exercise for literature review

Literature review is an important intellectual learning exercise, and not just for doing final year dissertation projects for tertiary education students. On these two topics of intellectual learning and literature review, the writer has compiled some e-learning resources. They are the Managerial intellectual learning Facebook page and the Literature on literature review Facebook page. Conducting literature review with the cognitive mapping technique is not novel in the cognitive mapping literature, see Eden and Simpson (1989), Eden, Jones and Sims (1983), Open University (n.d) and the Literature on cognitive mapping Facebook page. In this article, the specific steps involved in the cognitive mapping exercise are as follows:

Step 1: gather some main points from a number of academic journal articles on Corporate culture. This result in the production of a table (Table 1) with the main points and associated references.

Step 2: consolidate  the main points from Table 1 to come up with a table listing the cognitive map variables (re: Table 2).

Step 3: link up the cognitive  map variables in a plausible way to produce a cognitive map (re: Figure 1) on the topic under review.

The next section applies these three steps to produce a cognitive map on corporate culture.

Descriptions of cognitive map variables on the corporate culture topic

From the reading of some academic articles on Corporate culture, a number of main points (e.g., viewpoints, concepts and empirical findings) were gathered by the  writer. They are shown in Table 1 with explicit referencing on the points.

Table 1: Main points from the corporate culture literature and referencing

Main points from the corporate culture literature	Referencing
Point 1: "Much popular and scholarly attention has been focused on the hypothesis that strong cultures, defined as "a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization"( O'Reilly and Chatman,1 996: 166), enhance firm performance. This hypothesis is based on the intuitively powerful idea that organizations benefit from having highly motivated employees dedicated to common goals (e.g., Peters and Waterman, 1982; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Kotter and Heskett, 1992)".	Sørensen, J.B. 2002. "The Strength of Corporate Culture  and the Reliability of Firm Performance" Administrative Science Quarterly 47: 70-91.
Point 2: "Interest in the concept of organization culture has exploded in the past two decades. Researchers have approached the topic with a wide array of theoretical interests, methodological tools, and definitions of the concept itself. Debate over fundamental issues of theory and epistemology is intense (Martin, 1992; Trice and Beyer, 1993)".	Sørensen, J.B. 2002. "The Strength of Corporate Culture  and the Reliability of Firm Performance" Administrative Science Quarterly 47: 70-91.
Point 3: "Strong-culture organizations will, in general, be ill-suited to exploratory learning, for several reasons..... strong culture organizations may have greater difficulty recognizing the need for change".	Sørensen, J.B. 2002. "The Strength of Corporate Culture  and the Reliability of Firm Performance" Administrative Science Quarterly 47: 70-91.
Point 4: "Company culture might be best described what is done, but rather how things are done. It involves the feelings and attitudes that are attached to everyday work tasks. This means company culture has much more to do with the motivation behind an action, rather than the result it brings. This implies that cultural change cannot be brought about simply through direct instruction".	Wong, A. 2011. "Shaping Corporate Culture" Human Resources June: 42-43.
Point 5: "It is more or less assumed that a strong culture has a positive impact on performance. This, like any other platitude, is overstated, when not altogether erroneous".	Garmendia, J.A. 2004. "The Impact of Corporate Culture on Company Performance" Current Sociology 52(6), November, Sage: 1021-1038.
Point 6: "Cultural differences in workplaces are exemplified by the development of Lean Manufacturing practices in Japan [17], a philosophy now widely adopted in the U.S. and globally. For example, team-based solutions to production problems are undertaken by ‘Kaizen’ teams composed of front-line workers supported by management [18]. These teams are driven by philosophies such as ‘Single-Minute-Change-of-Dies’ that reduce repair, set-up, and other downtime contributors to machine availability".	Koren, Y., X. Gu and T. Freiheit. 2016. "The impact of corporate culture on manufacturing system design" CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 65: 413-416.
Point 7: "The corporate culture of government-controlled companies is essentially identical to the internal culture of the civil service, which is characterized by bureaucratic rationality. Technocracy, elitism, meritocracy and a strongly hierarchical structure are the most notable features of Singaporean bureaucratic rationality. Corporate culture within MNCs cannot be considered Singaporean because MNCs have their own cultures that owe little, if at all, to the host country of their investments".	Park, D. 2000. "Singaporean Corporate Cultures: An Introductory Overview" International Area Review 3(2) Winter: 51-66.
Point 8: "An initial approach to assess the influence of culture upon ethics and vice versa lies in analyzing how the sociological culture causes, firms located in different geographic environments to have ethical beliefs, which are valid for each of them, although there are differences between such beliefs".	Claver, E., J. Llopis and J.L. Gascó. 2002. "A Corporate Culture Patterns  to Manage Business Ethics" International Journal of Value-Based Management 15, Kluwer Academic Publishers: 151-163.
Point 9: "Sinclair (1993) points out that there are two ways of managing culture so that an organization is ethical: • Creating a strong, individualized culture with ethical values. • Generating subcultures by departments and groups of persons with ethical values".	Claver, E., J. Llopis and J.L. Gascó. 2002. "A Corporate Culture Patterns  to Manage Business Ethics" International Journal of Value-Based Management 15, Kluwer Academic Publishers: 151-163.
Point 10: "The threat of CEO change after poor performance is one of the main corporate governance instruments. It is widely believed that corporate culture plays an important moderating role in linking CEO turnover and past performance. Surprisingly, we are unaware of any large-sample empirical evidence indicating whether and how corporate culture influences the link between firm performance and the probability of CEO change".	Fiordelisi, F. and O. Ricci. 2014. "Corporate culture and CEO turnover" Journal of Corporate Finance 28, Elsevier: 66-82.
Point 11: "Culture is a broad concept and represents the implicit and explicit contracts that govern behaviour within an organisation (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002, 2011; Tabellini, 2008). Corporate culture is traditionally considered to have an important influence on an organisation's effectiveness (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982; Schein, 1992; Wilkins and Ouchi, 1983), and in a recent review of the literature, Sackmann (2010) suggests that some culture orientations have a positive effect on performance measures".	Fiordelisi, F. and O. Ricci. 2014. "Corporate culture and CEO turnover" Journal of Corporate Finance 28, Elsevier: 66-82.
Point 12: "While corporate culture concerns values, norms, beliefs, visible and invisible artifacts, (Schein, 1985; Rindova & Fombrun, 1998), organizational identity relates to what is perceived as central, distinct and continuous in the organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985). Whereas culture focuses on the group, identity relates to the multiple effects of how the group is perceived by external actors".	Deslandes, G. 2011. "Corporate culture versus organizational identity: implications for media management" Journal of Media Business Studies 8(4): 23-36.
Point 13: "According to Schein, the culture of a group can be defined as: A pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration (1985, p. 17)".	Deslandes, G. 2011. "Corporate culture versus organizational identity: implications for media management" Journal of Media Business Studies 8(4): 23-36.
Point 14: "As Hatch and Schultz have pointed out, “culture contextualizes identity” (2000, p. 25), it is what makes it possible, being in a way the smallest common denominator between members of the organization, without their being necessarily aware of it. From this point of view, organizational culture and identity mutually construct each other".	Deslandes, G. 2011. "Corporate culture versus organizational identity: implications for media management" Journal of Media Business Studies 8(4): 23-36.
Point 15: "When we look at companies' Web pages, we find that 85% of the Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P500) companies have a section (sometimes even two) dedicated to—what they call— “corporate culture,” i.e., principles and values that should inform the behavior of all the firms' employees. The value we find more commonly advertised is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%)".	Guiso, L., P. Sapienza and L. Zingales. 2015. "The value of corporate culture" Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier: 60-76.
Point 16: "There are several definitions of corporate culture. One view (see, for example, Cremer, 1993) is that culture represents the unspoken code of communication among members of an organization. A related view is that culture is a convention that helps coordination, like which side of the road we drive on".	Guiso, L., P. Sapienza and L. Zingales. 2015. "The value of corporate culture" Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier: 60-76.
Point 17: "A clan culture emphasizes consensus and highly values personal relationships, loyalty, and tradition (Deshpandé & Farley, 2004). Dominant attributes of this corporate culture are cohesiveness, participation, teamwork, and a sense of family. ....... An adhocracy culture focuses on an entrepreneurial spirit as well as on creativity and adaptability as dominant attributes. ....... Market culture is characterized by an orientation toward market superiority and a clear goal orientation (Deshpandé et al., 1993). Characteristic attributes for this corporate culture are competitiveness and goal achievement. ...... The last type, hierarchy culture, emphasizes order, rules, and procedures to ensure stability and uniformity as typical dominant attributes (Cameron & Freeman, 1991)".	Strese, S., D.R. Adams, T.C. Flatten and M. Brettel. 2016. "Corporate culture and absorptive capacity: The moderating role of national culture dimensions on innovation management" International Business Review 25, Elsevier: 1149-1168.
Point 18: "While corporate cultures focus largely on “the way things get done” in an organization (Deal & Kennedy, 1982, 4), national culture refers to how members of a culture generally act, regardless of whether the setting is professional, social, or private. In this sense, firms are able to influence their corporate culture, whereas national culture has to be seen as a circumstance that cannot be changed (Hofstede, 1994)".	Strese, S., D.R. Adams, T.C. Flatten and M. Brettel. 2016. "Corporate culture and absorptive capacity: The moderating role of national culture dimensions on innovation management" International Business Review 25, Elsevier: 1149-1168.

With a set of main points collected, the writer produces a set of cognitive map variables. These variables are informed by the set of main points from Table 1. These variables are presented in Table 2.

Table 2: Cognitive map variables based on Table 1

Cognitive map variables	Literature review points
Variable 1: Drivers of interest in corporate culture	Point 2: "Interest in the concept of organization culture has exploded in the past two decades. Researchers have approached the topic with a wide array of theoretical interests, methodological tools, and definitions of the concept itself. Debate over fundamental issues of theory and epistemology is intense (Martin, 1992; Trice and Beyer, 1993)".
Variable 2: Improve intellectual understanding of corporate culture	Point 1: "Much popular and scholarly attention has been focused on the hypothesis that strong cultures, defined as "a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization"( O'Reilly and Chatman,1 996: 166), enhance firm performance. This hypothesis is based on the intuitively powerful idea that organizations benefit from having highly motivated employees dedicated to common goals (e.g., Peters and Waterman, 1982; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Kotter and Heskett, 1992)". Point 11: "Culture is a broad concept and represents the implicit and explicit contracts that govern behaviour within an organisation (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002, 2011; Tabellini, 2008). Corporate culture is traditionally considered to have an important influence on an organisation's effectiveness (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982; Schein, 1992; Wilkins and Ouchi, 1983), and in a recent review of the literature, Sackmann (2010) suggests that some culture orientations have a positive effect on performance measures". Point 12: "While corporate culture concerns values, norms, beliefs, visible and invisible artifacts, (Schein, 1985; Rindova & Fombrun, 1998), organizational identity relates to what is perceived as central, distinct and continuous in the organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985). Whereas culture focuses on the group, identity relates to the multiple effects of how the group is perceived by external actors". Point 13: "According to Schein, the culture of a group can be defined as: A pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration (1985, p. 17)". Point 14: "As Hatch and Schultz have pointed out, “culture contextualizes identity” (2000, p. 25), it is what makes it possible, being in a way the smallest common denominator between members of the organization, without their being necessarily aware of it. From this point of view, organizational culture and identity mutually construct each other". Point 16: "There are several definitions of corporate culture. One view (see, for example, Cremer, 1993) is that culture represents the unspoken code of communication among members of an organization. A related view is that culture is a convention that helps coordination, like which side of the road we drive on". Point 17: "A clan culture emphasizes consensus and highly values personal relationships, loyalty, and tradition (Deshpandé & Farley, 2004). Dominant attributes of this corporate culture are cohesiveness, participation, teamwork, and a sense of family. ....... An adhocracy culture focuses on an entrepreneurial spirit as well as on creativity and adaptability as dominant attributes. ....... Market culture is characterized by an orientation toward market superiority and a clear goal orientation (Deshpandé et al., 1993). Characteristic attributes for this corporate culture are competitiveness and goal achievement. ...... The last type, hierarchy culture, emphasizes order, rules, and procedures to ensure stability and uniformity as typical dominant attributes (Cameron & Freeman, 1991)". Point 18: "While corporate cultures focus largely on “the way things get done” in an organization (Deal & Kennedy, 1982, 4), national culture refers to how members of a culture generally act, regardless of whether the setting is professional, social, or private. In this sense, firms are able to influence their corporate culture, whereas national culture has to be seen as a circumstance that cannot be changed (Hofstede, 1994)".
Variable 3: Effective corporate culture practices	Point 3: "Strong-culture organizations will, in general, be ill-suited to exploratory learning, for several reasons..... strong culture organizations may have greater difficulty recognizing the need for change". Point 4: "Company culture might be best described what is done, but rather how things are done. It involves the feelings and attitudes that are attached to everyday work tasks. This means company culture has much more to do with the motivation behind an action, rather than the result it brings. This implies that cultural change cannot be brought about simply through direct instruction". Point 6: "Cultural differences in workplaces are exemplified by the development of Lean Manufacturing practices in Japan [17], a philosophy now widely adopted in the U.S. and globally. For example, team-based solutions to production problems are undertaken by ‘Kaizen’ teams composed of front-line workers supported by management [18]. These teams are driven by philosophies such as ‘Single-Minute-Change-of-Dies’ that reduce repair, set-up, and other downtime contributors to machine availability". Point 9: "Sinclair (1993) points out that there are two ways of managing culture so that an organization is ethical: • Creating a strong, individualized culture with ethical values. • Generating subcultures by departments and groups of persons with ethical values". Point 15: "When we look at companies' Web pages, we find that 85% of the Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P500) companies have a section (sometimes even two) dedicated to—what they call— “corporate culture,” i.e., principles and values that should inform the behavior of all the firms' employees. The value we find more commonly advertised is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%)".
Variable 4: Learn from corporate culture practices	Point 5: "It is more or less assumed that a strong culture has a positive impact on performance. This, like any other platitude, is overstated, when not altogether erroneous". Point 7: "The corporate culture of government-controlled companies is essentially identical to the internal culture of the civil service, which is characterized by bureaucratic rationality. Technocracy, elitism, meritocracy and a strongly hierarchical structure are the most notable features of Singaporean bureaucratic rationality. Corporate culture within MNCs cannot be considered Singaporean because MNCs have their own cultures that owe little, if at all, to the host country of their investments". Point 8: "An initial approach to assess the influence of culture upon ethics and vice versa lies in analyzing how the sociological culture causes, firms located in different geographic environments to have ethical beliefs, which are valid for each of them, although there are differences between such beliefs". Point 10: "The threat of CEO change after poor performance is one of the main corporate governance instruments. It is widely believed that corporate culture plays an important moderating role in linking CEO turnover and past performance. Surprisingly, we are unaware of any large-sample empirical evidence indicating whether and how corporate culture influences the link between firm performance and the probability of CEO change".

The next step is to relate the cognitive map variables to make up a cognitive map on corporate culture. The cognitive map and its explanation are presented in the next section.

A cognitive map on corporate culture and its interpretation

By relating the four variables identified in Table 2, the writer comes up with a cognitive map on corporate culture, as shown in Figure 1.

These cognitive  map variables, four of them altogether, are related to constitute a systemic image of corporate culture. The links in the cognitive map (re: Figure 1) indicate direction of influences between variables. The + sign shows that an increase in one variable leads to an increase in another variable while a -ve sign tells us that in increase in one variable leads to a decrease in another variable.  If there no signs shown on the arrows, that means the influences can be positive or negative.  For further information on corporate culture, readers are referred to the Literature on corporate culture Facebook page.

Concluding remarks

The cognitive mapping exercise captures in one diagram some of the main variables involved in corporate culture. The resultant cognitive map promotes an exploratory way to study corporate culture in a holistic tone. The experience of the cognitive mapping exercise is that it can be a quick, efficient and entertaining way to explore a complex topic such as corporate culture in Business Management. Finally, readers who are interested in cognitive mapping should also find the article informative on this mapping topic.

Bibliography

1.      Claver, E., J. Llopis and J.L. Gascó. 2002. "A Corporate Culture Patterns  to Manage Business Ethics" International Journal of Value-Based Management 15, Kluwer Academic Publishers: 151-163.

2.      Deslandes, G. 2011. "Corporate culture versus organizational identity: implications for media management" Journal of Media Business Studies 8(4): 23-36.

3.      Eden, C. and P. Simpson. 1989. "SODA and cognitive mapping in practice", pp. 43-70, in Rosenhead, J. (editor) Rational Analysis for a Problematic World, Wiley, Chichester.

4.      Eden, C., C. Jones and D. Sims. 1983. Messing about in Problems: An informal structured approach to their identification and management, Pergamon Press, Oxford.

5.      Fiordelisi, F. and O. Ricci. 2014. "Corporate culture and CEO turnover" Journal of Corporate Finance 28, Elsevier: 66-82.

6.      Garmendia, J.A. 2004. "The Impact of Corporate Culture on Company Performance" Current Sociology 52(6), November, Sage: 1021-1038.

7.      Guiso, L., P. Sapienza and L. Zingales. 2015. "The value of corporate culture" Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier: 60-76.

8.      Koren, Y., X. Gu and T. Freiheit. 2016. "The impact of corporate culture on manufacturing system design" CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 65: 413-416.

9.      Literature on cognitive mapping Facebook page, maintained by Joseph, K.K. Ho (url address: https://www.facebook.com/Literature-on-cognitive-mapping-800894476751355/).

10. Literature on corporate culture Facebook page, maintained by Joseph, K.K. Ho (url address: https://www.facebook.com/literature.corporate.culture/).

11. Literature on literature review Facebook page, maintained by Joseph, K.K. Ho (url address: https://www.facebook.com/literature.literaturereview/).

12. Managerial intellectual learning Facebook page, maintained by Joseph, K.K. Ho (url address: https://www.facebook.com/managerial.intellectual.learning/).

13. Open University. n.d. "Sign graph" Systems Thinking and Practice (T552): Diagramming, Open University, U.K. (url address: http://systems.open.ac.uk/materials/T552/) [visited at April 10, 2017].

14. Park, D. 2000. "Singaporean Corporate Cultures: An Introductory Overview" International Area Review 3(2) Winter: 51-66.

15. Sørensen, J.B. 2002. "The Strength of Corporate Culture  and the Reliability of Firm Performance" Administrative Science Quarterly 47: 70-91.

16. Strese, S., D.R. Adams, T.C. Flatten and M. Brettel. 2016. "Corporate culture and absorptive capacity: The moderating role of national culture dimensions on innovation management" International Business Review 25, Elsevier: 1149-1168.

17. Wong, A. 2011. "Shaping Corporate Culture" Human Resources June: 42-43.