In simple terms, corporate culture signifies a set of principles, values, practices, and codes of behaviour, which are peculiar to a corporation. Corporate culture is greatly linked to corporate strategy. The strategic achievement of a corporation relies on the way in which the culture of the corporation promotes risk-taking and reception of response in the corporation.
Similarly, corporate culture and strategy relate since corporate strategy can be developed by learning the corporate culture in position. Corporate strategy depends on the culture laid down in the corporation. The culture adopted by any corporation is conventionally the set pattern of carrying out things. Corporate culture is what establishes the approach and conduct of any worker in a given condition.
Corporate culture could be influenced to position a corporation to higher prominence among its competitors (Johnson, Scholes & Whittington 2008). A suitable corporate culture can easily turn into a successful corporate strategy.
A corporation with an insubstantial or missing culture is set to either wander along or fall to the suppression of rivals with a dominant culture. On the contrary, a business with an instituted culture frequently selects its employees anchored on the reality that they bear similar values, thus turning them into a cohesive unit.
The link involving corporate culture and strategy stands out conspicuously in a management corporation having a well-built corporate culture of employing young, active, brilliant, and dedicated workers who assist in driving the corporation to thrive. These workers are frequently graduates of esteemed business schools.
In this regard, corporate strategy and culture are interlocked; therefore, the corporate culture is a youthful, onward-believing, result-oriented employees and section of the policy is to hire the finest graduates from the reputed business schools. Corporate culture and strategy are components of the chief contributing aspects of the far a corporation will go as well as the components of deciding if a company will prevail the distance.
For instance, in an aggressive market, a business shapes its corporate culture in such a way as to allow it to have an excellent competitive strategy. In this sense, if the business embraces a culture of well-built work ethics, it could bring an increase in production, which can be attributed to a corporate strategy.
For instance, in a case where there exist two different fast food shops in an area, one shop may close at around nine o’clock in the evening whereas the other delights itself on remaining open until midnight (Linnenluecke & Griffiths 2010). This operating time signifies both a corporate culture and strategy.
Most businesses put great importance and attempt in formulating policies to attain competitive advantage. Nevertheless, researches point out that strategy is less significant than the business potential to perform, which relies greatly on corporate culture (Beardwell & Claydon 2007).
Corporate culture is thus vital to organisational achievement. Developing a winning corporate culture is possibly the most significant strategy employed by human resource management in assisting a company to improve novelty, worker and client commitment, income and market share increase, and economic performance. Culture has the power to either encourage or hold back strategy implementation.
The human resource management thus embarks on a strategy to create a culture that strongly influences conduct, performance, and outcomes. Other strategies used by human resource department in aligning corporate strategy and corporate culture include personality, organisational, and profession.
Personality management involves helping workers to recognise their strengths and weaknesses, rectify their inadequacies, and formulate their best involvement to the corporation. This aspect is enhanced through actions like testing and performance assessments.
Organisational progress centres on promoting a victorious system that makes best use of human (as well as other) resources as components of superior business policies.
This significant duty as well comprises the formation and safeguarding of a change plan, which permits the company to act in response to growing internal and external influences (Beardwell & Claydon 2007). Lastly, there is the strategy of managing profession development, which involves matching people with the most appropriate jobs and profession paths in the corporation.
Knowledge on skill deficiencies is fundamentally based on the response given by the Transport and Logistics (T&L) industry. The Regional Skills Shortages Survey (RSSS) of 2006 identified hardships in filling numerous driving professions in the Transport and Logistics industry comprising truck drivers, cargo and furniture managers, coupled with taxi, bus, and car drivers.
Labour force requirements in the freight sector as well as the other sectors are powerfully linked to economic progression. The most current sharp shortage of drivers was mainly due to a grouping of skills shortage with a general shortage of workforce in a tight marketplace.
While stress on labour accessibility has eased owing to the global economic hold back, shortages of expertises are still at hand in a number of areas (Kazalac, Ramsay & Morris 2008). For the freight segment and the Transport and Logistics industry in Australia, labour shortages have a tendency of being a recurring setback.
Particularly, the shortage of the drivers of trucks and trains has been encountered in the latest history of both Australia and Victoria and thus ensuing in the establishment of different studies recently. Additionally, an ageing labour force presents a major setback in the future of the freight labour force and of the overall Transport and Logistics industry.
The elderly profile emphasises the need to comprehend the retirement objectives of the employees, how to deal with an older labour force, and the way to hire fresh drivers into the sector.
Strategies to assuage the ‘Skills Shortage’
Setting the road freight industry to compete more successfully for workforce
This possibly comprises facilitating cultural transformation in the road freight industry including mounting the recognition of the significance of training, encouraging a constructive and fashionable image, and (with a dependable Transport and Logistics branding) generating clearer training and profession conduits.
Others include creating more elastic and novel work practices and operating agreements to develop working situations and improving agreeableness at the place of work. Payment is a separate knob to draw or maintain staff and is definitely quite a dissimilar deliberation to training and expertise development, but it is highly significant (Kazalac, Ramsay & Morris 2008).
Widening the staff base
This potentially embraces policies to preserve knowledgeable and older employees, escalating the pool of employees with targeted service programs to hire women, and indigenous employees coupled with building up stronger connections (that comprise career plans) with the ancillary industry and other appropriate sectors.
Others include extending best practice analysis indicating innovative staffing strategies and information sharing and creating vacancies and positions (comprising rotation plans catering for minor operators) (Kazalac, Ramsay & Morris 2008).
Improving regulatory and strategy modification
This aspect mainly concerns removing obstacles of access into the labour force. It possibly comprises:
- Enhancing greater professional mobility in the Transport and Logistics sector and amid other sectors
- Investigating skilled migration standard as possible resolutions for tackling persistent expertise scarcities in regional spots or the long-run
- Making sure that certification and other recommended plans do not enforce a needless load on the road freight industry
- Reassessing international knowledge (comprising road safety results) related to graduate licensing systems supported by capability-based training and skill (Kazalac, Ramsay & Morris 2008)
The idea that the Human Resource (HR) role moves past its managerial and controlling positions in a bid to add value has been accepted in the United States’ management contents for long.
Developments in the function of Human Resource Management (HRM) obtained from varying business requirements and tendencies (Harzing & Pinnington 2010). Seven compelling tendencies in management beliefs and performances have altered the function of HR. These include the following:
- Acceptance of HR policies
- Augmented significance of human capital
- Flexibility and yield progress
- Increased answerability
- Organisational alteration
- Partnership affiliations
- Rising application of human resource information systems
Strategic human resource management draws concentration to the increased significance of human capital as a policy for sustainable competitive advantage. The involvement of human capital to the bottom line of a company is at times delicate, occasionally mystifying, and occasionally very compelling.
The answerability concern is demonstrated by cases of strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices that pose their achievement in measurable progressions (Chang & Huang 2005). The premise following this idea can be demonstrated by a declaration that in case one does not discern the way to measure the chief value-generating asset, then one cannot manage it.
Partially in return to the improvement and approval of HR strategies, in addition to the improvement of outsourcing the human resource role, the HR career is greatly trying to join forces with line management through the building of affiliation relationships with different managers.
A significant part of HR is being capable of expressing to line management the end result involvement of the HRM role. Researchers and scholars have employed numerous measures of organisational performance that include the following:
- Component cost ratios
- Income productivity
- Labour output ratios
- Quality of product and service
- Return on Investment
Researchers have a tendency of relying on single pointers of performance, disregarding the affiliations involving multiple measures, and a propensity of ignoring the reality that a number of organisational performance measures, for instance variation in market share.
In addition, researchers take much time to adjust to worker conduct and employ performance pointers across divergent workplaces with no consideration of their suitability, thus making comparisons worthless (Chang & Huang 2005).
Since work organisations are present with the aim of realising a goal(s), research has frequently conceived organisational performance with regard to goal realisation, with four particular pointers reflecting this advance. These four pointers include the following:
- Income-related indices
- Measures of goal realisation
- Production
- Quality
It is currently widely distinguished that the present international ecological regime is not performing well. From uncertain attempts to comprehend and tackle the prospect of climate variation to depressing concerns of food security, displeasure amid politicians, businesspersons, ecologists, and the public in general proliferates.
A number of the flaws can be pointed to a history of administration inadequacies and technical entrapments, but other features of the predicament are profound and structural. Failed joint action signifies work design challenges that prevail in a global environment. Environmental directive at the global stage necessitates a classic extent of cooperation amid countries.
In scholarly language, it poses an intricate joint action setback. Since global environmental setbacks are diffuse and thus extend across time and space, incentives occur to disregard trans-boundary emanations and overlook the management of joint resources (Mohamed & Lashine 2003).
The disintegration, gaps in coverage of subjects, and even negations amid dissimilar treaties, societies, and agencies with ecological tasks create hardships in realising international environmental strategy consistency.
A persistent lack of statistics, knowledge, and very restricted strategy transparency increases the challenges, and thus makes even concurrence on the extent of setbacks difficult to obtain. The darkness and confusion intensify the appeal of permitting others bear the environmental challenge. However, when everybody decides to stand on the fringe, no achievement is realised.
The model of sub-optimal strategy results can be traced to several sources that include inadequate human and monetary resources, technical inefficiencies, insufficient scientific reinforcements, and a deficiency of dedication to analytic rigidity in many international entities.
Additional global challenges that include international financial administration, population management, and a range of world health predicaments (for example, elimination of polio as well as small pox) are examples of challenges that have already been effectively dealt with.
In the global environmental sphere, achievement has been realised in a few numbers of instances where case particular institutional systems satisfactory to a given problem materialised, the outlays of the status quo coupled with the advantages of achievement were grasped, and political entrepreneurship became bound to extend effective, proficient, and innovative strategy solutions.
However, the list of accomplishments is short and thus institutions are very significant (Leichenko 2011). The global ecological architecture has confirmed itself unable to successfully deal with the challenges it encounters. Change is necessary to better assist cooperation in reaction to international issues.
The current changes like internationalisation and varying employees profile continually challenge the workforce in Singapore. Devoid of trade unions, workers that are poorly informed regarding their rights will be taken advantage of (Leggett 2011). In Singapore, the Trade Unions Act describes a trade union to be any establishment of workers whose main goals are:
- To better the working states of workers or improve their financial and social rank
- To boost productivity for the advantage of employers, workers, and the economy of Singapore
- To encourage good trade relations
Similarly, the National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) in Singapore has been a major partner in establishing constructive industrial relations. NTUC recognised that they could assist workers to better their working situations and guard their concerns simply when there is profitable growth.
Nevertheless, to attain economic growth, a steady and pleasant industrial relation has to exist first. An appropriate industrial relations scheme is one in which associations involving management, workers, and the administration is in agreement and accommodating.
Singapore has realised a pleasant industrial relations environment through strong affiliations with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), NTUC, and Singapore National Employers Federation SNEF). Additionally, the tripartite relations have responded quickly and assisted Singapore to prevail over the Asian economic predicament thus recovering its economic competitiveness via successful cost-reducing measures (Leggett 2011).
The pleasant business atmosphere consecutively attracted excellent investments and led to uninterrupted economic growth, which as well has generated more job openings and in addition improved the lives of people living in Singapore.
Reference List
Beardwell, J & Claydon, T 2007, Human resource management: A contemporary approach, Pearson Education, New York.
Chang, W & Huang, T 2005, ‘Relationship between strategic human resources management and firm performance: A contingency perspective’, International Journal of Manpower, vol. 26 no. 5, pp. 434-449.
Harzing, A & Pinnington, A 2010, International human resource management, Sage, New York.
Johnson, G, Scholes, K & Whittington, R 2008, Exploring corporate strategy: Text & Cases, Prentice Hall, New York.
Kazalac, L, Ramsay, E & Morris, J 2008, ‘Workforce planning issues in the freight industry’, 31st Australasian Transport Research Forum, vol. 30 no. 1, pp. 202-212.
Leggett, C 2011, ‘5 Labour markets in Singapore’, The Dynamics of Asian Labour Markets, vol. 83 no. 1, pp. 254-256.
Leichenko, R 2011, ‘Climate change and urban resilience’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 3 no. 3, pp. 164-168.
Linnenluecke, M & Griffiths, A 2010, ‘Corporate sustainability and organisational culture’, Journal of world business, vol. 45 no.4, pp. 357-366.
Mohamed, E & Lashine, S 2003, ‘Accounting knowledge and skills and the challenges of a global business environment’, Managerial Finance, vol. 29 no. 7, pp. 3-16.