Abstract
Sweeping changes threaten to make yesterday’s managers outdated while an awareness of the changes and how to take advantage of them offer tomorrow’s managers countless opportunities. From the extensive research on corporate culture, the challenges and barriers facing new managers wishing to change an existing organizational culture are identified.
These managers are vulnerable to different environments, national cultures, organizational trends and organizational behaviors adopted in particular firms. Embedded in this research is the fact that people enter into organizations carrying cultures of the surrounding communities that also influence the existing corporate cultures. As a matter of fact therefore, the managers are tasked with learning the societal cultures especially when most of the firms have internationalized their operations.
This paper points out that the changing social and cultural environments are exposing managers to numerous challenges related to organizational culture. A manager seeking to change an already changing culture has the responsibility of shifting the changes towards the core initiative. It is noted that the force of nature exerts much pressure on organizations to the disadvantage of management initiatives.
That is, if globalization is the trend towards winning competitive advantages, managers have no other option but to develop a culture that responds to such changes. Again, if technology adoption is the answer to successful business, then it must be a priority to the management.
Unfortunately, very few corporate cultures will support such initiatives and hence high resistance towards such changes. This paper provides an extensive discussion on the difficulty of changing an existing culture that is characterized by developmental changes over time.
Introduction
Sweeping changes threaten to make yesterday’s managers outdated. However, an awareness of the changes and how to take advantage of them offer tomorrow’s managers countless opportunities. Even though the nature of managerial function varies across organizations and changes continually, one general thread pervades nearly all managerial activities: interacting with different people. Therefore, the behavior of people and management process in firms are clearly intertwined (Scheffknecht, 2011, p.76).
This paper relates the wider field of management to the specific area of organizational culture. It argues that a new leader coming into an organization will have a difficulty in changing an existing organizational culture. In that respect, the paper explores the three important environments that are considered important in changing organizational culture: social and cultural environment, global environment and technological environment.
Social and cultural environment
Organizational culture and the general social and cultural environments can be considered to interlock in that people enter organizations from surrounding societies and bring their culture and social life with them. Therefore, the changing social and cultural environment influences corporate culture and is a big challenge to managers endeavoring to change the culture.
Forces in this environment are those that effect changes in how people live and work. Mohanty and Rath (2012) think that managers must be responsive to those changes that take place in the surrounding societies as they affect all aspects of corporate culture, yet new managers will have little knowledge about those changes.
For instance, new leaders are tasked with the development of corporate ethics and well-being in order to initiate change. Sims (2009) considers corporate ethics as one element of corporate culture that is hard to change, as ethics are defined differently by individual organizations.
No wonder huge ethical scandals such as Enron and Hewlett-Packard have plagued hundreds of United States firms. Unethical behaviors damages firm’s reputation and cost the firm the goodwill of employees and customers. Moreover, the losses could lead to financial and economic damage of the firm. Managers who wish to change such a culture are required to establish an ethical code that defines acceptable behaviors and develop a framework of rewards and punishments to implement ethical codes.
However, to some firms, social or ethical responsibility means doing any action provided that it is legal. In such a culture, developing a code of ethics that helps the firm to protect their reputation and ensure the goodwill of employees and customers is hard for a newcomer. As Sims (2009) notes the challenge is to build an organizational culture where members oppose the temptation to act in ethical manners that promote individual interests at the cost of the firm or promote the interest of the firm at the cost of the society.
Indeed, many executives have been unable to take effective measures when confronted by an ethical scandal. For example, Citigroup suffered dearly from a scandal and the executives could only chose corporate silence in order to maintain the reputation of the company (York, Gumbus and Lilley, 2009).
Workforce diversity is also a big challenge to managers wishing to change an existing organizational culture. In as much as an organization is legally and socially committed, it must include employees from different diverse environments. However, some organizations are not sensitive to the diversity issue while others have overemphasized on the issue. As a matter of fact, the number of women and minorities being hired by firms is increasing.
The demographic composition of workers has changed considerably as more female workers and minorities enter the workforce. This means that new managers must address this factor when changing organizational culture. Studies have shown that workforce diversity is an important resource to improve performance and that quality of decision making is richer and broader in terms of diverse employees (Moran, Harris & Moran, 2010).
While this is an important consideration to managers, some existing organizational cultures discourage such efforts to an extent of justifying that diversification lowers the quality of management. Such believe makes it difficult for managers to change the culture as it requires the commitment of both the manager and employees.
Global environment
The global business environment is changing drastically thus requiring new approaches to business (Brakman, 2006, p.9). Apart from the changes in regulations, diversity and consumer behaviors, the global economic factors have experienced significant economic changes thus influencing organization cultures greatly.
For many organizations, the focus is to create a culture that might improve competitive advantages and eventually the profitability in a threatening economic environment. Therefore, the organizational cultures that are witnessed today have nothing to do with the traditional emphasis on aligning corporate cultures with national cultures. Firms including small-to-medium enterprises (SME) are internationalizing their operations in search for business opportunities (Schuler, 2000).
As a matter of fact, today’s managers are challenged by a myriad of factors stemming from the changing global environment. First, as noted earlier, cultural differences influence corporate culture in different countries. Management functions directed to corporate culture become more complex as the firm’s activities expand internationally, and coordination of organizational and decision-making issues becomes significantly difficult (Moran, Harris & Moran, 2010).
Managers fight in vain to create a corporate culture that balances between the needs of the foreign markets and the impact of the cultural disparities on important organization issues such as evaluation, compensation packages and promotion policies.
Second, understanding global difference is a challenge to new managers in appreciating the changing global environment. There are issues related to understanding corporate behavior in diverse global settings. Corporate culture becomes especially complicated at global level since desires, attitudes and values of employees differ across countries (Moran, Harris & Moran, 2010).
Again, the issues of coordinating activities to match organizational environment become more complicated as firms expand internationally. In addition, many organizations are locating in a specific region because this permits them to increase efficiency, but in this manner, also affects on corporate culture.
Third, global learning or the process of attaining and learning the knowledge, skills and corporate behaviors that have helped organizations abroad to become strongly positioned in the global market is also a challenge to new managers. For this challenge, managers will be required to create a corporate culture that might allow the firm to rotate employees to other foreign operations in order to learn the opportunities and problems that lie overseas.
Apparently, this is difficult for the managers and costly to the firm. No wonder many researches on expatriation have pointed the key challenge to successful expatriation as the capacity of the organization to create a culture that arms the employees with the necessary skills and knowledge to fit in foreign cultures (du Plessis & Beaver, 2008; Franke & Nicholson, 2002).
Technological environment
One element of organizational culture that firms have focused on is innovation. Almost every organization creates a culture that might make the employees more creative. The most significant driver to innovation is information technology (IT) and its integration in business operations. In as much as IT is important to organizational activities, it poses a major challenge to today’s managers (Cronley & Patterson, 2010).
They have no other alternative but to involve IT when changing the organizational culture. In order to promote organizational learning and create knowledge, they must use IT to define, acquire, arrange, organize, input, manipulate, transmit and store information. Organizational learning can only occur if the employees can manage knowledge and information to attain a better understanding of the need to change.
Regarding technology Melitski, Gavin and Joanne (2010) shed a light on organizational culture and its adoption. According to them, organizations are increasingly operating in uncertain, decentralized, networked environments, where adoption of IT has become essential to organizational change (p.546). Indeed, organizational cultures institutionary shape the way in which firms choose to use technology.
The researchers also showed that there are environmental factors which influence employee’s willingness to adopt new technology (p.563). When the organizational culture is supportive, the probability of adoption is substantially higher. Employees who work in firms where work is well organized, their opinions are considered and they are well informed about the relevant issues in the firm will likely be more willing to adopt new technologies.
Unfortunately, many organizations do not have a supportive culture that can enhance the willingness of employees to adopt new technologies. Recently, changes in organization culture have taken many directions with respect to technology, work and employment relationships.
Technology adoption has been associated with downsizing, the growth of temporary workers or contingents, outsourcing and employees no longer spending their full careers with one firm. As a result, new managers have to work with employees whose confidence with the firm is fainted by changes taking place within and hence are likely to resist change.
Conclusion
Organizational culture change means changing the corporate philosophy, the values and images that tell action and this new approach to understanding the corporate life must be passed into the process of management. The reason why it is difficult to implement change of an existing culture lies in the challenges posed by changes in global, technological, social and cultural environments.
References
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