Study notes on academic ideas about corporate culture

Study notes on academic ideas about corporate culture

Academic ideas are bolded

Jeffrey J Bagraim. “Organisational psychology and workplace control: the instrumentality of corporate culture” S. Afr. J. Psychol. 200 I, 31 (3).

“Smircich (1983) drew a clear distinction between two approaches to understanding organisational culture. One approach assumes that organisational culture is a root metaphor. Organisational cognition, organisational symbolism, and organisational psycho-dynamics are perspectives within this understanding. The other approach assumes that organisational culture is a variable. This approach includes the perspectives of cross-cultural management (culture as an independent variable) and corporate culture (culture as an internal variable)”;

“The corporate culture perspective adopts a structural functionalist position. It emphasises that organisations are producers of culture that maintain social structures. The cultural context of organisations is recognised but the emphasis is placed on social and cultural qualities that develop within organisations and represent the collective consensus of organisational members (Smircich, 1983). This approach implies that organisational culture is something that the organisation "has", as opposed to something that the organisation "is" (Smircich, 1983)”;

“An organizational culture is typically termed "strong" if it is distinctive and characterised by significant consensus between organisational members regarding their beliefs, values, norms and ideals (Robbins, 1996). A "strong" culture therefore effectively communicates to employees how they should behave and that acceptance of this will be beneficial to the organisation, customers and society. Communications regarding excellence, customer service, loyalty, and teamwork all fall into this category. Top management assume the role of primary force in the formation, maintenance, assessment and change of organisational culture (Legge, 1995); "the unique and essential function of leadership is the manipulation of culture" (Schein, 1985, p. 317)”;

Jesper B. S0rensen. “The Strength of Corporate Culture and the Reliability of Firm Performance” Administrative Science Quarterly, 47 (2002): 70-91.

“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). In particular the performance benefits of a strong corporate culture are thought to derive from three consequences of having widely shared and strongly held norms and values: enhanced coordination and control within the firm, improved goal alignment between the firm and its members, and increased employee effort”;

Andrew Klein, (2011),"Corporate culture: its value as a resource for competitive advantage", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 32 Iss: 2 pp. 21 – 28.

“... organizational contingency theories and strategic choice models (Child, 1972), posit that resources and type of strategy interact to produce results. Pfeffer notes, for example: ‘‘The conventional wisdom, taught in numerous human resource courses in business schools and frequently stated in articles, holds that management practices need to be contingent on the firm’s particular product strategy’’ (Pfeffer, 1998, p. 56). Following this conventional wisdom, organizations employ both tangible resources, such as financial and physical assets, and intangible resources, such as human resources and corporate culture, in the formulation and implementation of their generic strategic type (Porter, 1985; Miles and Snow, 1978). Intangible are more likely than tangible resources to yield a competitive advantage because they tend to have VRIO characteristics – they are valuable, rare and difficult to imitate (Barney, 1986; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Socially complex resources such as corporate culture are unique”;