Organisational Culture Assignment Sample

HI6005: Organisational Culture

Management Summary

Many types of research have shown that workplace cultures control various aspect of a corporate environment, which include employees' behavior, ideologies, the value of a firm, and much more. It is a well-known fact that every firm has its way of doing things which is unique and can be distinguished. Every firm develops certain sets of guidelines for the workers and expects them to follow them. It provides them with a sense of understanding each other, minimizing conflicts, and promoting good communication. In addition to this, a good corporate culture establishes equality by making sure that none of the employees gets neglected in the working premise and that each of them is treated with equal respect. In this report, a well-researched discussion on organisational culture was done. In today’s day and age, a company wants to make their working environment to be competitive that matches the world-class standards. Still, it has been found that the corporate culture is evolving slowly. In this report, the corporate culture was explained in-depth. The term originates from the word organisation which was defined in the report as the common platform where people from different background, age, interest, etc., work together in order to achieve personal goals, make profits and sustain their livelihood as well. The report highlighted that the organisational success is directly related to the corporate culture as it makes employees happy and inspires them to give their best at work. This helps the company to extend its boundaries. In addition to this, the report also elucidated that a good corporate culture can also provide employees with a sense of understanding with each other, minimising conflicts, and promoting good communication. Furthermore, a good corporate culture establishes equality by making sure that none of the employees gets neglected in the working premise and that each of them is treated with equal respect. The report also discussed the importance of stakeholder and argued that the organisation success depends on the loyalty and stakeholder’s satisfaction, the organisational culture should be established considering the client’s needs. In other words, it can be quoted as putting stakeholders first. In the context of CSR, the report outlined that the main profits of organising a CSR program are to make the organisational culture robust and to promote it. It has been determined in many research studies that workers who presume their organisation to be socially responsible will be more focused, attached, determined, and committed to the company.

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Introduction

They say "to understand an organisation, first understand its organisational culture". A lot many research works has compared the cultures of different enterprises in order to prove the importance of organisational culture and what effects they have on the organisations. Before understanding the organisational culture, learners should first understand the meaning of the term “organisation”. It is defined as the common platform where people from different background, age, interest, etc., work together in order to achieve personal goals, make profits and sustain their livelihood as well. Each organisation has established its own modus operandi which defines its culture. The organisational culture consists of beliefs, principles, ideologies, and values of an enterprise. In today’s day and age, the companies are putting so much of their attention on company culture. The most prominent of which is the newly born start-ups. The leading organisation, such as Google is well-known for its culture. It believes that every employee spends more than 40 hours working for the company. Therefore, organisational culture should cast a positive impact on workers' lives both professional and personal. Many business tycoons have shared their personal views about the organisational culture. Some say that it helps in uniting workers within an organisation. In a corporation, there are employees that belong to a different culture, traditions, background, families, demography, etc. Therefore, an organisation can act as a platform where they can have a shared culture. This provides them a sense of belongingness and unity. Apart from this, it can also provide them with a sense of understanding each other, minimising conflicts, and promoting good communication. In addition to this, a good corporate culture establishes equality by making sure that none of the employees gets neglected in the working premise and that each of them is treated with equal respect. Organisational culture helps in keeping employees motivated. In addition to this, it also helps in keeping the employee turnover rate low. With a healthy organisational culture, the company can make them feel important for the organisation. This, in turn, increases the quality in their way of working. In this report, the corporate culture will be discussed thoroughly. A thorough discussion on how a healthy corporate culture leads to organisational success will be talked about here in the context of JB Hi-Fi limited. The important point to note here is that there are various dimensions that are used to describe organisational culture. Two such determinants have been taken just to have a better understanding of the corporate culture.

Organisational Culture and Organisational Success

The corporate culture is one of the hottest topics in the corporate world and every organisation whether small or big is focusing on how to establish an effective and well-functioning environment within an organisation (Scott, et.al, 2018).JB Hi-fi ltd claims to be Australia's biggest retailer specialised in home entertainment products, such as Video games, CDs, DVDs, TV, tablets, and much more. Since the company deals in a wide variety of products of different brands. This would require the management to hire people from different region across the world. The company has made a name by offering a unique, effective, and luxurious benefits to the workers by changing the office rules and culture (Bailey, et.al, 2017). It offers many perks, such as flexible working time and extended vacation time. There is a various way of promoting a healthy corporate culture. In fact, cultural components like a mission statement or common values can be very effective in aligning the workers in compliance with the organisational goals.

Corporate culture is one of the crucial factors for long-term business success. The first step large business organisation like JB Hi-fi Limited should do is to make a set of priorities by aligning with the overall organisation's goals. The company not only aims at doing as good as it is possible but it also motivates the employees to do well at their individual levels. These principles are established at the levels within an organisation. Having a well-established purpose can motivate an organisation staying on a right track with its purpose and stick with it (Kumarand Sharma, 2018). This helps the JB Hi-fi Limited to motivate and inspire its employees to buy into the purpose and close the feedback loop. If all this happens in real, then the organisation would become more focused, more capable, and more aligned. Even though the company is high performing, it faces many challenges in attracting new talent. The company spends a lot of dollars in posting job ads, contacting professional consultancy, etc. A well-established organisational culture can help in getting the talented professionals (Laforet, 2017). This individual seeks job opportunities in those organisation where there is a set modus operandi. They want regular salary hike based on their performance. In fact, they don’t just seek a raise in their pay, but they are more interested in a sound and efficient culture. If they find that the culture of a particular organisation does not suit them, they will move on. Organisational culture helps in keeping employees motivated. In addition to this, it also helps in keeping the employee turnover rate low. With a healthy organisational culture, the company can make them feel important for the organisation. This, in turn, increases the quality in their way of working. Providing employees with an ideal corporate culture can help the organisation to retain the valuable candidate and prevent them from quitting the firm. JB Hi-Fi Limited is working consistently to make its employees feel truly valued and invested in their work. The office culture should not be too rigid that employees start showing disorientation towards their work nor it should be too flexible that they start taking work casually. There should be a proper balance between the two.

An effective culture in an organisation makes employees feel passionate about their work. This contributes to the organisational productivity, creativity, and innovation. In other words, the organisational success is directly related to the corporate culture as it makes employees happy and inspires them to give their best at work (Scott, et.al, 2018).This helps the company to extend its boundaries.

Dimensions to Identify Corporate Culture

As it is already discussed that all organisation including small, medium, and large-scale are working hard to establish an effective corporate culture. Even if an organisation does not put many efforts into developing it, but the fact is the corporate culture is always present. The dimensions are important from the examining point of view of corporate culture. The management by analysing the dimensions of corporate culture can make decisions regarding the future investments (Pedersen, et.al, 2018). Here, two dimensions have been covered in-depth that would reflect the performance of corporate culture of JB Hi-Fi Limited.

Stakeholder-Value Orientation

Stakeholders are those who are directly or indirectly associated with the firm and they have a stake in the organisation's performance. Stakeholders include people, such as customers, vendors, shareholders, employees, suppliers, distributors, neighbourhoods. If a firm builds strong orientation towards developing values for the stakeholders, then the entire firm will reflect it. An organisation that needs to build a strong and positive relationship with the stakeholders should be well aware of what its values are. In addition to this, the company should have a consistent behaviour in order to make them understand the key message it sends (Andriof, et.al, 2017). If any organisation fails in adhering to its values, then it may get easily exposed. Speaking in the context of JB Hi-Fi Limited, it is the largest retailer of home entertainment devices. This makes it a complex network of several groups and individual interests. The culture of any organisation is usually conservative. However, it can be altered both in the external and internal environment. This is a paradoxical statement and can be explained by the facts that people perceive organisational culture in their minds(Kumarand Sharma, 2018). The corporate culture is highly influenced by the diversity in the stakeholders’ beliefs and their interest which are interdependent. Since, it is almost impossible to meet everyone’s requirements at a time, many a time some interests may get ignored. Hence, the involvement of certain people in the organisational decision-making can impact the balance of power, fulfilment of their own needs, and achievement of the goals (Andriof, et.al, 2017). All these discrepancies faced by the organisation may try to reinforce the impact on corporate behaviour and culture. It is a well-known fact that the corporate world in today’s time is very competitive. This has created a tremendous pressure on the firm to continually improvise the values of its services to various stakeholders(Pedersen, et.al, 2018). This can be done by improvising the management of activities and events. In addition to this, the big organisation like JB Hi-fi Limited can achieve a higher value by providing a range of services. The company is driving changes in organisational culture. It is acting responsibly by keeping a right balance between the economic, social, and environmental objectives of the firm and the personal interest of stakeholders (Mbau and Gilson, 2018). The future success of the company depends on how the management addresses the objectives of organisational culture and that of stakeholders (Jensen, 2017). This can turn up the organisational challenges into opportunities. No doubt the organisation success depends on the loyalty and stakeholder’s satisfaction, the organisational culture should be established considering the client’s needs (Sawan,et.al, 2018). In other words, it can be quoted as putting stakeholders first. For this purpose, one has to first understand who actually the clients are, what they want, how well an organisation can fulfil their needs, and how well a firm can add value to them. JB Hi-Fi has created has developed an environment where it has stopped the sales of certain complex products to a few corporate groups and ended the business terms with those who pose a reputational risk for the company.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility is also called corporate sustainability and is defined as a self-regulating model of an organisation that is opted by the businesses to become socially acceptable and accountable to the society and its stakeholders. Nowadays, this concept is very popular as the majority of organisations are taking an initiative of contributing back to the society (Witjes, et.al, 2017). The organisations are aiming to become conscious about their social, economic, and environmental impacts on the society. Many research works have proved the interconnection of organisational culture with the Corporate Social Responsibility. The corporate culture and CSR are two complex topics and yet important. It reflects the company’s proactivity through values, assumptions, and beliefs. These are demonstrated through worker’s behaviour and decision-making abilities. In addition to this, it also showcases the firm’s ability to carry out business operations responsibly and irresponsibly. Therefore, the orientation of corporate culture impacts the JB Hi-fi Limited’s tendency towards sustainability and CSR. There are many types of research done to establish a direct link between the two concepts.The organisational culture at JB Hi-fi limited is characterised by friendly, happy, and helpful employees. The company creates a corporate culture of helpfulness and reinforcing the employee through jobs and volunteer participation (Lo, et.al, 2017). The corporate culture envisaged by those who are external to the company is that JB Hi-fi's employees are helpful, friendly, and happy. The CSR methodology of the organisation aligns with the corporate culture. Since the organisation culture of JB Hi-Fi Ltd emphasises more on customers, this has put an extra pressure on the organisation to give them back. CSR approaches can help in this. The corporate culture can be bifurcated into 3 dimensions, namely competitive, humanistic, and market. In humanistic culture, a special attention is given to teamwork, people, sensitivity, and cooperation. This espouses a concern towards the needs, demands, and interests of external stakeholders rather than putting the focus on one's personal needs. As humanistic cultures are inclined towards the stakeholders’ concerns, it is rational to say that companies that make use of humanistic approaches and can do well in CSR and sustainability (Supantiand Butcher, 2018).Another way of interconnecting the organisational culture with CSR approaches is by including the CSR programs in the objectives of the corporate culture. Through the CSR programs, JB Hi-Fi can communicate and impart knowledge, experience, and attitudes.

The employees are the manufacturers and the society is the receiver. The employees are more interested in doing some work for a noble cause. That's why they never hesitate in contributing their efforts towards the betterment of the society. However, the actual rationale of organising CSR programs hints at certain motives of reaping benefits by the company (Lins, et.al, 2017). CSR programs aim at doing noble deeds for the betterment of the society and these efforts should be well appreciated. However, these programs indirectly benefit the business organisation. One of the main profits of organising a CSR program is to make the organisational culture robust and to promote it. It has been determined in many research studies that workers who presume their organisation to be socially responsible will be more focused, attached, determined, and committed to the company. In addition to this, they are likely to outperform other irresponsible employees in terms of CSR contribution and organisational work. This increases tremendous pressure on the organisations to organise CSR activity. This can have dual advantages. First, it increases the employee retention rate and makes the recruitment process easy. Moreover, it increases the organisation’s productivity as employees perceive the organisation to socially responsible and a fair firm and motivates them to contribute to the society and to the company with the utmost dedication and loyalty.

The final interrelation between CSR and corporate culture can be see-through bureaucracy. JB Hi-fi Ltdhas to take care of massive bureaucracy in the internal business reporting and accounting that are necessary to govern the whole CSR programs. The development and handling of such a large bureaucracy require a firm's staff, structure, and resources, which can help in organising the CSR programs (Supantiand Butcher, 2018). In short, the CSR programs are beneficial for all the stakeholders of a company, such as employees, investors, directors, suppliers, distributors, etc.

Conclusion

Organizational culture or corporate culture is characterised by behaviours and values that make an organisation unique in terms of the psychological and social environment of a firm. Nowadays, the company wants to make their working environment to be competitive that matches the world-class standards. Still, it has been found that the corporate culture is evolving slowly. In this report, the corporate culture was explained in-depth. The term originates from the word organisation which was defined in the report as the common platform where people from different background, age, interest, etc., work together in order to achieve personal goals, make profits and sustain their livelihood as well. In the document, it was highlighted that organisational culture should cast a positive impact on workers' lives both professional and personal. Many business tycoons have shared their personal views about the organisational culture. Some said that it helps in uniting workers within an organisation. In addition to this, the report also elucidated that a good corporate culture can also provide employees with a sense of understanding with each other, minimising conflicts, and promoting good communication. Furthermore, a good corporate culture establishes equality by making sure that none of the employees gets neglected in the working premise and that each of them is treated with equal respect. To end the report on a high note, a thorough discussion on how a healthy corporate culture leads to organisational success will be talked about here in the context of JB Hi-Fi limited. The important point to note here is that there are various dimensions that are used to describe organisational culture. Two such determinants have been taken just to have a better understanding of the corporate culture.  

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References

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