In the study of the human behavior, there have been different types of studies to understand the complexity of human psyche. It is possible to find studies focused on internal perspectives to give explanation for our behavior, focused on our psychodynamics. By the other hand there are some scholars focused in the importance of external events that shape human conducts, as factors to which we are subjected to.
However, people do not tend to be on the extremes, and it is necessary to be more balanced. As for instance, it is not true to say that the only motivation to work is the need of personal achievement or just the money. This is why within this discipline there are a lot of interdisciplinary influences to find a solution to this contradiction, as for instance from psychology, sociology, engineering, anthropology, management and event medicine.
But these disciplines have been inserting concepts and tools not just to the study of the individual psychodynamics, also to the group interactions. Understanding that organizations are social entities in which there are interactions, with a goal that guides the course of action, deliberately structured, in an environment, makes that organizational behavior is more complex than just the sum of individual psyches. The organization can be explain also in metaphors, as clockwork or a snake pit, but another time human behavior is not on the extremes. One thing is what is on paper, as the formal organization that should be. Another is the informal entity that is more attached to its values, beliefs, feelings and attitudes, and what actually the organization is.
Challenges diversity, globalization, multiculturalism, ethical and moral standards have been creating pressure on people’s behavior. Understanding the role of culture, the importance of study the national culture and its influence in businesses, the organizational culture that can be in every organization and how to asses organizational culture are new issues arising in organization matters.
The understanding of national culture is a matter for a lot of multinational companies. Generalization and stereotypes should be avoided to create real competitive advantages base on the awareness of the importance of national culture doing businesses. Having consciousness of manners and customs, social structures, communication, attitudes towards time, work and cultural change, for a company can give advantage over other competitors.
At the same time, knowing about national culture is not enough. The knowledge about the organizational culture of a organization can give guidelines to understand behaviors and make a better internal and external integration. The organizational culture allows to a company to understand how to do things and to define procedures, leadership and working conditions; how to be consistency and be capable of adapt your organization to change, as the top-down and bottom-up vision would be define within organizational culture.
Business implications of national and organizational culture
AB InBev[1] it is one of the most known beer companies around the world, created in 1999 with the merger of two Brazilian companies, Antartica and Brahma, merging later with other Belgian company, Interbrew, continuing growing with new acquisitions and mergers. At these days, the company is owned and directed in a majority by Brazilians, but it is main factories for the European markets are located at Belgium.
This company has been a case of study, according to media and general opinions because Brazilian style management has brought confrontations at the local level in factories. The organizational culture brought by Brazilians to Belgium producers and workers has been generating cultural problems within the organization, a management focused on profitability and the impact of decisions at the stock market. As for instance, before the Brazilian acquisition all employees were allowed to carry out some beers, even to drink during work time at factories; with the new management there were a lot of changes in which was not take into account the national culture, generating a big uncomfortable situation, that in long term has been creating a bad image of the company, affecting its European consumers’ perceptions.
Here is an interesting video about this case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7tUt_udrl4
Other case talking about national and organizational culture can be studied at the level of any local, national or multinational organization operating in Brazil during the World Cup in 2010. During the matches, all type of companies had to make a lot of contingency plans to deal with the issue of watching the games and avoiding absenteeism. This happens because within Brazilian national culture, soccer has a crucial role in their social life, that can be compare as a religion, that any type of match should be assisted, or if not would be a matter of huge stress. According with a survey done to 659 enterprises, 85% suffered a low in their productivity, with a 67% diminution of efficiency of their employees[3]. What can managers do to deal with this type of situations? That is why in some many cases managers organized ‘parties’ at the work place[4]. These parties had as main issue how to avoid that employees waste time going to their places, giving them the opportunity to assist the match at the office, in some cases with food and beer. Which means a contradiction with the last case AB InBev, where Brazilians prohibited to Belgian producers to consume at the factory, but they can do it just in special cases, but the main issue is that is mandatory for everyone to watch the game. Like in religious dogmas, if you do not watch it, you should not be in Brazil.
A new company, a new culture
Usually individuals as a social agents organize themselves in groups, getting together for a common purpose. However, to let a group continues through time usually there would be an institutionalization and consolidation by the creation of an organization. When we talk about an organization is more than a simple grouping of individuals with a common purpose, where usually the leaders of the organization would be conducting the others and themselves all as a machine. For that reason, leaders pass all these ideas to paper in order to create main guidelines to the members of the organization.
These guidelines, as general instructions, managerial style of leaders and members’ dynamism would create a culture within the organization. As Schein (1984) says, founders have an important task in the process of creating and shaping the cultural paths putting their visions, defining how the organization should interact with the world from their point of view. So in that way, every organization should have a culture to interact as a group within their communities. Without a define culture the organization could be compare as a machine that does not have screws tight perfectly and any bad movement could damage and break it.
If we understand organizational culture as Schein, is as a pattern of basic assumptions that a specific group invented, discovered and developed in the process of learning how to deal with internal and external adaptation, working well and considered as valid, being teach to new members of the group as a the correct way of perceiving, thinking and feeling related with the problems of adjustment. From this perception almost every organization has its own beliefs and values to “do things” that are passed to all members.
What can be different from the organization A, to the organization B, is how strong its culture is. We can identify companies as General Electric, a multinational company which during more than a century has been creating leaders within the organization, which allows them to cover a lot of business units around the world, tighten by its organizational culture[5]. There are a lot of companies as Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Southwest Airlines and others that have been creating through time a strong culture.
However, this culture can be modified principally by its own leaders. There is an important link between leadership and organizational culture. According to Schein (1986) the leader is the one on charge of creating, building, sustaining and evolving the organization. That is why is so important for every company within the organization the continuity of creation’s leadership but oriented to organization’s strategies.
The implications of being a leader within the organizations show the importance of management to defined goal-directed strategies thinking the leadership as a managerial tool and not as personal skill used for individual purposes. Leaders can work for own benefits without taking into account what the organization would like to be, or what owners would like to keep. A bad leader can lead the company to bankruptcy, not necessarily economically; the worst are the ones where organizational culture brakes in pieces together with gaps and patches that in the long term would give less consistency to the organization, affecting its existence.
Schein, E. (1984). Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture. MITSloan Management Review , 25 (2), 3-16.
Schein, E. H. (1986). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons.
[3] http://g1.globo.com/concursos-e-emprego/noticia/2010/07/jogos-do-brasil-causaram-perda-de-produtividade-85-empresas.html
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