What is a Corporate Culture?

The most important step to introduce successful planned change management programs is to understand the corporate culture of an organization.

We all know that companies with outstanding financial performance often have powerful corporate cultures, suggesting that “culture” is the key to an organization’s success.

Cultural change does not happen in an organization; it is usually result of a complex change strategy implemented by company’s management.

Let’s examine what is corporate culture all about:

A corporate culture is a system of shared values and beliefs that interact with an organization’s people, structure, and system to produce behavioral norms (“the way things are done around here”)

Therefore, Corporate Culture is defined as “an interdependent set of beliefs, values, ways of behaving, and tools for living that are so common in a community that they tend to perpetuate themselves, sometimes over a long periods of time.”

A corporate culture gives the whole organization a sense of how to behave, what to do, and where to set the priorities in getting the job done.

Corporate culture helps members fill in the blanks between formal directives and how the work actually is done.

A great majority of companies trace their culture back to an influential founder who personified a value system and relentlessly hammered in a few basic values that become the cultural core of the company.

However, in today’s rapidly changing environment, many corporate cultures fail to adapt to change and therefore fail as economic entity. This where the challenge for a change manager actually arises out.

As discussed above corporate cultures are very essence of organizations. Whether effective or ineffective, organizational culture exists-usually reflecting the personality of top executive. Corporate cultures often affect the success or failure of the organization and are shaped in various ways by the employees.

Changing corporate culture is not easy. Culture emerges out of the shared behaviors and working relationships of organization members that have developed overtime. Consequently it takes time for a cultural transformation to take effect.

A culture can also prevent a company form remaining competitive or adapting to a changing environment.