The Organizational Culture Affects The Organization

To understand the organizational culture of a company, one needs to start by looking at the history. Lakeshore Learning Materials was born from a divorced mother of three named Ethelyn Kaplan, who took a dream and a chance by moving her family to California in 1954 to open a toy store. When she started noticing that teachers were interested in her material, Ethelyn realized that she needed to expand her business into educational materials. 60 years later, Lakeshore Learning Materials has grown into a company with over 2000 employees, 60 retail stores throughout the United States and growing. Lakeshore Learning Materials is currently headed by Ethelyn’s grandsons, Bo and Josh Kaplan. Under the supervision of Bo and Josh, Lakeshore continues to be a leader in the Educational Materials, yet still able to keep the family culture that their grandmother started. Highest quality customer service and hard work are the core values that shape Lakeshore’s Organizational Strategy. These high expectations aren’t hard for employees at Lakeshore because the company is so loved by everyone that works there, that they give nothing less than the best.

Organizational structure has been set up to facilitate all goal achievements. It is a way to motivate their employees and get them to work together. It also helps its employees to follow the organizations goals, and work together as a team. In order to do this, they need to have an organized structure to be able to run the company smoothly. A main foundation of every organization is to post their mission statement and goals everywhere so that their employees can see them. An organizational culture can consist of common shared beliefs and values that are established by the organization’s leader, and then communicated and reinforce through various methods, this helps shape employee perceptions, behaviors and understanding. Overall, organizational structure and culture can effect progress of many organizations in a positive and negative way.

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline . . . Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, and then one can be a leader. — Sun Tzu

Rizescu, M. (2011). Orgainzational Culture Influences on the Organization's Functionality. Revista Academie ForTelor Terestre. 1( 61): 75-82.

Lesley Willcoxson & Bruce Millett ABSTRACT Culture is a term that is used regularly in workplace discussions. It is taken for granted that we understand what it means. The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss some of the significant issues relating to the management of an organisation’s culture. As organisational cultures are born within the context of broader cultural contexts such as national or ethic groupings, the paper will commence by defining ‘culture’ in the wider social context. This definition will subsequently form the basis for discussion of definitions of organisational culture and the paradigms and perspectives that underpin these. The paper will then discuss the issue of

Effectiveness is regarded as the most suitable factor to measure the success of any organization. Besides this, there are certain things due to which this effectiveness can be achieved and culture is one of them. A good organizational culture is a key factor in achieving effectiveness. However, on the other hand, some of the researchers are opposed to this fact and according to them; there is no impact of culture on organizational effectiveness.

Organizational culture is a belief that employees share values, beliefs, or perceptions regarding an organization, or a hierarchical society (Tsai, 2011). This is depicted as the qualities, convictions, or observations held by workers inside an association or by an authoritative unit. Since organizations reflect the qualities, convictions and behavioral standards that are utilized by workers, the circumstances that they experience can impact the mentality and conduct of the staff. One perspective through Peasre and Kanyangale (2009) concentrates on consensus, common values, and standards that are seen by the organization as a whole, allowing employees to act in a compelling manner towards others and to translate the significance of the conduct of others in different settings. As an organizational counselor, one must be able to help clients define what the acceptable behaviors are. Furthermore, a counselor must also be able to provide methods of modification to behaviors that will be generalizable to various settings (Hackney and Cormier, 2013). Researchers subscribing to this point of view refer to culture as “collective programming” or group awareness, and “shared underlying beliefs” or group values. The consensus point of view focuses on examples, shared characteristics, or the inside of an organization as a dynamic unit. Points of view like this allow for the systematic recognition of coalitions. When coalitions are discovered, they can be reframed to understand the

Interest in the area of corporate culture is said to have originated in the 1970s as a response to the success of Japanese management and the perceived failure of traditional organizational analysis (Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv & Sanders, 1990; Ouchi, 1985; Martin & Frost, 1999). Since then, research has flourished, with particular emphasis placed on the link between culture and corporate performance (Kilmann, Saxton & Serpa, 1985). Observations of the most well-known, best run companies, like IBM and Google, seem to suggest that having a unique, cohesive culture can propel a company above the competition (Kilmann et al., 1985). Following from this, it makes sense that figuring out how to control culture to achieve competitive advantage has received a lot of attention from scholars and management alike (Anthony, 1994).

Organisational culture refers to a structure of shared perceptions, ideologies and beliefs that present the suitable and unsuitable behaviours to the organisation’s employees. .These principles have a huge effect on employee attitudes and overall organisational performance. Corporate culture could become one of the organisation’s strongest assets or its biggest liability, based on strategies utilised by managers to share customs and values with employees. . The culture, traditions and shared values within an organisation could lead to in enhanced corporate performance. Researchers have discovered that a relationship between corporate culture and company performance, regarding indicators that includes revenues, sales volume, market share and stock prices. This was reflected in the 2007 survey conducted by Bain and Company exhibited results that identified business culture is an important strategy for its corporate success

The Business Dictionary defines organizational culture as values and behaviors based on “shared attitudes, beliefs, customs, and written and unwritten rules that have been developed over time” (“Organizational Culture”, 2017). Simply put, organizational culture is how people learn, think and act on a daily basis within an organization. But if organizational culture is only unique social and psychological environments within a business, then how is it possible that it can be just as influential as business strategy? Research suggests that a strong organizational culture is a key competitive advantage of business because it can be the driving force behind innovation and alignment of goals, help motivate and engage employees, and generate fierce customer loyalty.

The consequence of this is stress because of high risk and delayed feedback. By adopting this culture Alphabet games could suffer the impact from larger companies. Alphabet games are good at planning ahead as the case study shows, high risk provides the possibility of high reward and this dynamic has created market opportunities for the more aggressive and creative companies and development, but as technology advances at such a speed they need to move fast. Alphabet games must make quick decisions based on what the customers want. The bet the organization culture would be best for planning for the future. By factoring in expanding risk to their business plans and projects they can ensure the right decisions are made. This may not have a positive effect on the management approach due to feedback being slow as it can sometimes take years before knowing whether a decision has paid

To define organizational culture we must first understand what a culture is in relation to an organization. Culture can be defined as the acquisition of knowledge that individuals may use to try to interpret experiences and facilitate a social behavior that is appropriate (Deem, DeLotell & Kelly, 2015). Eaton & Kilby (2015) examines culture as an entity that is always with us, it is all around us. It is created and expanded by our constant interactions with others.

An organisation culture is developed when the members of an institution shared a set of common values, traits and symbols (Helms, 2001). This culture represents an identical trend in patterning and integration (Schein, 2004), in which the ways of thinking and believe are similar in the members of the unit (Marquis & Huston, 2009). However, an organisation culture does not just form by itself. According to Schein (2004), culture and leadership are fundamentally interlaced and are able to influence each other. On one hand, Schein described leaders as the architect who formed the culture, but he also stated that culture can also influenced and shaped the type of leader. In this article, the influence of culture in determining the type of

Edgar Schein: a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group has learned as it solved its problems that has worked well enough to be considered as valid and is passed on to the new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to these problems.