Main components of corporate culture

In any MsDonald’s restaurant, regardless of its locality, you’ll find the familiar interior design and the identical menu – these are all components of one of the most prosperous companies’ image. Its success stems not only from food quality but also from its strong corporate culture. Every company employee is well acquainted with the behavioural norms, cultivated in McDonald’s. High quality, qualified service and cleanness – are the main components of its success. To maintain the company’s reputation, to use the best ingredients are the fundamental principles of the company.

This corporate culture was formed by Ray Croc, who headed the company up to 1984. After his death, the company’s place on the market has not changed. The current managers of the company, brought up on his principles, usually arrive at the decisions, similar to those of Croc. That is why McDonald’s does not yield an inch of its market position in the world.

Corporate culture is an immaterial, inherent category that does not, on the other hand, need to be proved. Every company works out a set of rules and regulations that govern everyday behaviour of employyes. Until newly employed workers have mastered these rules, they will not be able to become full-right members of a company. The management of a company encourages following the rules with the help of reward and promotion. Disney employees are stereotyped as smiling, well-balanced and good-natured, since it is the company’s image, maintain by all its employees. That is why, when in the company, new employees try to act according to its rules.

In accordance with the modern theoretical approach, a company is seen as a culture and just like any social group, a company has its own rules, roles, rituals, heroes and values. A researcher’s task lies then in defining a type of corporate culture of a certain company in order to understand how it functions, how it influences its employees and how the employees influence the company.

The cultural approach to the organizational theory sees both an organization and its members as people with shared values and as implementers of common tasks. Just like citizens of a country, employees provide their company’s growth and prosperity. They, on the other hand, use the results of its prosperity. Therefore, employees’ productivity and their morale are inseparable.

Each company has its own culture. Corporate culture resembles an individual’s personal qualities: it is not material but it is always there, it directs, it makes meaningful a company’s activity. Corporate culture consists of shared by all members values, ideas, expectations, norms, acquired while adapting to the company’s routine. Just like an individual’s personality influences the individual’s behaviour, corporate culture influences behaviour, opinions and actions of a company’s employees. Corporate culture determines employees and managers’ approach to problems, their servicing the company’s clients, their relations with suppliers, reactions to competitors and their performance in general – at present and in future. It determines a company’s place in the world, it symbolizes unscripted rules, norms and regulations that unite and bond a company’s members.

Corporate culture develops in time, like national and ethnic culture. Just like them, it elaborates its own values and behavioural norms. Some companies encourage certain behaviour models while other companies do not approve of them. Some companies, for instance, create an ‘open’ culture which encourages employees to doubt everything and initiate new approaches. In other companies, innovations are not upheld and communication is reduced to a minimum. Some people prefer working for companies with a ‘closed’ culture: one comes to work, gets through with an individual task and returns to one’s own private life that has nothing to do with one’s wok. Other people look for family-type companies where private and professional lives are tightly bound.

A company usually creates certain rituals and traditions that contribute to its corporate culture. A ceremony of rewarding hard-working employees sets a value of persistent work and creativity. Some companies cultivate free dress code on Fridays: an employee does not have to wear a suit and a tie. This tradition encourages informal communication and closer personal relations between companies’ members. Other companies resent the very idea of free dress code: all their employees stick to formal clothing and it inevitably influences their communication patterns.

Corporate culture determines risk levels, acceptable in a company. Some companies reward employees eager to try a new idea, other companies are conservative, they prefer a clear instruction in any decision-making process.

Conflict management is another indicator of corporate culture. Some companies consider conflicts as constructive component of any growth and development; others try to avoid conflicts in all situations and on any levels of management.