Introduction
Organizational management is quite a complex task. The complexity of managing organizations is exacerbated by the fact that organizations recruit their workforce from different places. According to the theory of organizational behaviour, managing organizations entails the management of both physical and human resources of an organization.
The management of human resources is a comprehensive process that entails the deployment and guidance of workers towards the attainment of organizational goals. Organizational goals are attained by the virtue of the desired discharge of organizational functions by the organizational employees.
Managing people in organizations entails the management of their needs and their behaviours. The competitive nature of the contemporary organizational environment requires strategic crafting of human resource practices to contain the challenges of management. Culture is one of the issues of employee management that poses a challenge to the management of employees in organizations.
The quest for performance management requires the need for organizational managers to comprehend the dynamics of the environment in which the employees of the organization are drawn from (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2007).
In this paper, it is argued that culture is a critical practice, yet the dynamics of culture ought to be given attention by organizational managers because it has both a direct and indirect impact on the adaptability and performance of employees.
This paper explores the issue of culture and its influence on the management of employees in organizations. The discussion centres on two main issues: the challenge of managing employees who are drawn from diverse cultures and the issue of the existence of different cultures in different organizations.
Understanding the influence of culture on organizational management
As observed in the introduction, contemporary organizations operate in a complex environment. The complexity of the operational environment or organizations is compounded by the issue of culture and its influence on organizational management. It is vital to define culture in the context of managing an organization to understand how culture can bring about conflicts in the management of employees in organizations.
Culture is simply defined as the patterns and forms of behaviour that are long held by an individual or an organization. From the organizational context, culture can be defined as the collective patterns of behaviour and values, which result in the uniqueness of the psychological and social environment of a given organization.
Culture is comprised of organizational members, shared beliefs, behaviours, and values, as well as symbols that streamline the actions and decisions of individual organizational members in an unconscious way.
Therefore, it can be argued that culture begins with the norms that result from the manner in which the functions are discharged in the organization (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2007). At this point, the question that ought to be answered concerns the influence of culture on organizational management.
The structure of operations in organizations is a critical practice that aids in the discharge of organizational functions by organizational employees. As has been noted, culture revolves around the human activities that develop into organizational norms. Organizational norms often define and shape the conduct of employees. Therefore, a change in the norms can easily result in the disorientation of employees in the organization.
This is because of the fact that the psychological and social attachments of the employees are based on given norms. This is best explicated in what is referred to as the emotional organization (Ashkanasy, Wilderom and Peterson 2011). A substantial number of people see organizational culture as the main factors that unite organizational members. However, organizational culture can equally be a disuniting factor.
This often comes out in cases where there are a lot of cultural variations. In most cases, the cultural variation in organizations is brought about by organizational change (Austin and Ciaassen 2008).
Zell (2003) observed that there are a lot of complexities that are brought about during the implementation of change programs in organizations. These changes can have both a direct or indirect impact on the norms of the organizations and influence the behaviours of organizational employees. A notable instance is the rearrangement of the existing employees and the recruitment of a newer set of employees in the organization.
It takes longer for the new set of employees to adapt to the culture of an organization. In most such cases, organizations often witness a period of confusion and malfunctioning because of the low level of compatibility that comes from the problem of adapting to the culture of the organization.
Organizational culture and conflict
Ashkanasy, Wilderom and Peterson (2011), observed that there is a vast amount of empirical research seeking to explore the relationship between organizational culture and conflicts in organizations.
In order to gain insight into the prevalent relationship between organizational cultures, it is critical to review the facts about organizational culture and the role that is played by organizational employees in shaping up the culture of an organization. The definition of organizational culture denotes that there is a set of factors in organizations that shape the patterns of behaviours in organizations.
The individual aspect is a critical factor in the definition of the organization. This is because organizational employees are considered to be the most critical resource in organizations. The culture of any given organization is highly built around the behaviours of employees and other organizational members. Cultures are built by the long held practices of organizational members.
However, it must be noted that the culture of an organization cannot be static. The rationale behind this observation is that organizations keep making changes as part of improving their competitive strategies. The implementation of new strategies in organizations has been often a resounding destabilizing factor in the culture of an organization (Spielberger 2004).
Conflict arises when new and challenging practices are introduced into organizational functions as part of the enforcement of strategies. New work practices imply new forms of behaviour and nature of work for organizational employees.
Therefore, the patterns of work in the organization are affected by the frustrations that come from dealing with the new set up or work in the organization. However, this does not always mean that new practices destabilize the practices and the culture of an organization (Spielberger 2004).
Another dimension to the issue of culture and conflicts in organizations comes from the issue of individual behaviours within organizations. Individual behaviours can be understood from the cultural variations of individuals within organizations. Organizational members, among them the employees, vary in a substantial number of ways.
They vary in skills, level of competence, sex, level of experience, social and economic background, race, their habits, likes and dislikes among many other features. Therefore, it can be argued that the very nature of the existence of organizational members in organizations denotes conflicts.
The different factors that define each individual makes organizational management a complex process because it is quite tasking to combine all the diversities of individual organizational members in a single work environment (Spielberger 2004). However, this is the essence of the existence of organizational management, especially the human resource management department.
Individual features that have been mentioned denote individual cultures, which have to be bound by the culture of the organizations. Whether this is possible is a question that has remained crucial to a substantial number of researchers who research in the field of organizational behaviour.
Individual cultures have a significant impact on organizational conformity. In most cases, conflicts that are witnessed in organizations come from the issues that revolve around individual values within the organization (Nelson and Quick 2011).
Organizational culture and innovation in organizations
According to McLean (2005), there is a profound relationship between the change in the culture and organization and the level of creativity and innovation in the organization. This has a closer relationship with the functioning of organizational projects in what is known as group roles.
In the contemporary times where most organizations advance their performance through organizational projects, it has been observed that groups in organizations are bound by certain norms. Any change that is introduced in the organization is bound to destabilize the orientation of organizational groups, thus affecting the results of organizational projects.
The dynamism of the external and internal environment in organizations often necessitates changes in the structure of operations, which interferes with the progress of work in organizations. This applies to both the organic and mechanic organizations (McLean 2005).
According to McLean (2005), different work factors, for instance the shifting roles of employees in organizations, often interfere with work support for the employees, thereby affecting creativity and innovation. The issue of creativity and innovation can be looked at from two perspectives: work support and work impediments.
Any set of change in the operations of the operations of organizations is likely to induce destabilization on the work practices of employees. This is more trivial when the organization is implementing a set of projects geared towards bringing about innovation in the products and services of the company.
This is the reason why a number of organizations, more so the technical organizations, invest a lot of resources in organizational projects. Examples of these organizations are Microsoft, Apple and Samsung among a number of other organizations.
The investments include outsourcing of employees, thorough training and update of employees with the technical systems and operations of the organization and offering of adequate support to the employees. This is done in order to ensure the adaptability of the employees and prevent them from being swayed by any changes that may occur when they are working on the organization’s projects (Kaufman and Sternberg 2010).
McLean (2005) observed that there are a number of practices that can be used to encourage creativity and innovation amidst the operation of an organization in an increasingly dynamic environment. These include supervisory encouragement, organizational encouragement, freedom, work group support, and the discharge of enough resources for the discharge of organizational work.
Work support is critical and complex, yet a critical exercise in managing the employees and culture change in an organization. It is both a physical and psychosocial process that reassures the employees in the organization. Work support is the level at which the employees of an organization feel and believe that they are gaining support from different dimensions to enable them deliver on their roles.
It entails the allocation of time, equipment, materials, as well as services that are necessary for easing organizational operations. Socio-emotional support is part of work support. It makes the employees feel that the presence of interpersonal support in the organization. This adds to the level of emotional stability of the employees, thereby encouraging their performance (Sims 2002).
According to Gelfand, Leslie, Keller and de Dreu (2012), the cultural orientations of organizations vary. Therefore, different organizations have distinct cultures. The most critical question to ask at this point is how managers deal with the issues of conflicts that arise from the diversity of cultural aspects of management. It is critical to note that different organizations have different conflict cultures.
This brings about a variation in the choice of means of managing cultural-related conflicts. The dynamics of managing conflict cultures are exacerbated by the fact that different organizational units are often faced with different conflict cultures.
While a number of organizations are able to develop cultures that enable them to amicably manage conflicts, a substantial number of organizations find it quite daunting to manage conflicts that emanate from cultural variations. It is critical to explore the reason why such a scenario exists.
The question that is often posed by a number of organizational psychologists is whether cultures in organizations are often potential sources of organizations. If this is the case, what should organizations do in order to solve the conflicts that are brought about by the cultural dynamics in organizations? (Saunders 2010).
Cultural dynamics in organizations resonate from within and without the organization. Therefore, it is quite difficult for organizations to maintain certain practices due to the internal and external forces, which denote organizational changes.
This implies that organizations cannot avoid the variations in culture, thus organizational managers must learn how to develop the managerial techniques to help manage the conflicts that result from cultural change. What ought to be noted is that management of conflicts is complicated by the fact that the cultural conflict management strategies impact on both the individual preferences, as well as groups in the organization.
Cultural drawn conflicts are best sorted by adopting a strategic approach, which addresses the concerns of individual employees and the organization at large. The individual needs are given attention in cultural conflict management because most of the factors of culture in organizations are drawn from and centred on organizational members.
People are impacted up by different cultural underpinnings, which sway the culture of the organization. Therefore, the strategies of managing cultural conflicts in organizations should be built around the social and normative dimensions.
This implies that the individual culture ought to be unified into a single and coherent culture. However, it has been noted by a number of researchers that individual cultures can be hardly erased; they can only be suppressed by the orientation of human resource practices in the organization (Johns 2006).
According to McLean (2005), human resource development is one of the managerial strategies that are often used to prepare and shape employees amidst the dynamics of the organization. One critical thing that features in human resource development practices in organizations is the issue of training the employees.
Training is a comprehensive practice that does not only entail the familiarization of recruits to the work processes and systems of an organization, but also equips the employees with skills that can enable them respond positively to changes that occur in the organizations.
As observed earlier, employees are by their very nature different in terms of a number of factors among them gender, level of educations, their social background, the nature of training and qualification and the kind of organizations from which they are drawn among other variations. These variations depict variations in the cultural set up of organizational members.
Under the very nature of the cultural set up of individual employees, it becomes quite daunting to attain a harmonized organization. Therefore, the training and motivation of employees in human resource development remain to be some of the most fundamental means of harmonizing the individual cultures by binding them under a unitary culture; the culture of the organization.
It can be argued that this reiterates a point that comes out strongly in organizational behaviour theories, that employees are a critical resource in any organization. In most cases, organizations that have highly developed human resource functions are proactive in terms of managing culture change (Gelfand, Leslie and Keller 2008).
De Dreu and Weingart (2003b) observed that despite the prevalence and implementation of human resource practices, individual cultures are still seen as a source of internal frictions in organizations. Individual cultures are outlined as major impediments to the attendance of a higher level of conformity in organizational groups.
Though such conflicts are not very visible, they smoulder with time and clump down the operations of the organizations. Such conflicts are often termed as the source of a decline in the performance of groups within the organization. Therefore, organizational managers are often advised to remain on the look so that they can detect and control the influence of individual cultures within their organizations.
De Dreu and Weingart (2003a) ascertained that individual cultures combine with the complexities that resonate from the difficulties of discharging a number of roles in organizational teams. Different psychological models have been developed and are being deployed in the management of behaviours that are drawn from individual cultures. The models are incorporated in performance management practices (De Dreu 2007).
Conclusion
Culture is the most critical issue that affects the management of people in organizations. Culture entails the norms, symbols and values that define the character of people. Organizational culture, on the other hand, entails the long held practices in an organization that serve to define the nature and pattern of interactions and managerial practices in an organization.
From the discussion in the paper, it is evident to note that culture is highly determined by individuals within the organization. Therefore, cultural conflicts in organizations are often derived from individual cultures. Individual cultures reduce the level of conformity of organizational members, thus necessitating friction in groups.
This results in the failure of the groups to deliver. This is common in organizational groups. Cultural variations can also bar organizations from attaining the desired level of creativity and innovation. The main way of dealing with the problem of cultural variations is by seeking for means of binding individual cultures through the enhancement of a unitary culture in the organization.
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