Understanding Corporate Culture: A Comparative Study

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nside Corporate Culture In an ever-changing and fast paced business environment that most businesses today are entering, there is a need for a competitive advantage. In a business environment with a new generation entering the workforce, there’s much more observed than whether a business is performing well. Other aspects, specifically corporate culture, is taken into account and assessed in regards to a company’s performance and likeability. This paper will cover the background and importance of corporate culture in relation to values, mission and ethics through studies and real-life company examples such as Google and Amazon. Although there are many different definitions of culture, culture can be defined as “the set of values, norms, guiding …show more content…

2) Underlying values, beliefs, attitudes and feelings. Some examples of visible and observable behaviors are type of dress, how people act in the office, how the office is designed, etc. The non-visible is define a company’s culture. “Probably the most cited perspective on corporate culture is that of Schein (1985). He defines culture as having three levels. The most visible, but most superficial, level is that of culture as a pattern of behavior. It is ‘the way things are done around here,’ the norms, the stories, the symbols. These behavioral patterns reflect a second, deeper, level of culture, which are the firm’s shared values. Shared values are, on their turn, driven by the third and most fundamental level of culture: shared assumptions” (Van den Steen, 7). It is then easy to make the assumption that the framework for analyzing and measuring organizational culture is shared …show more content…

External heterogeneity may not seem important but if there is a company that has a strong internal homogeneity but the values and beliefs do not coincide with outside consumer values and beliefs, there is a chance for a company to fail because the consumers do not agree with those beliefs of the company. A few examples would be this year’s Wells Fargo fake account scandal or the Volkswagen emission scandal. In the Wells Fargo fake account scandal, the CEO made aggressive sales goals that employees felt the need to unlawfully create new bank and credit-card accounts for the customers without the customers knowledge to meet these sales goals. This is a highly unethical practice, which damaged the company’s reputation and resulted in firing 5,300 employees according to

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