Culture and Strategic Management

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Culture and Strategic Management

Amar Bhide (2007) once said that “An organization’s capacity to execute its strategy depends on its “hard” infrastructure--its organization structure and systems--and on its “soft” infrastructure--its culture and norms.” This quotation the best describes the value of culture within any organization.
Strategy may be defined as the direction and scope of an organization over the long term, which achieves advantage in a changing environment through its configuration of resources and competences with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations. Every organization has to manage its strategies in main three areas: the organizations internal resources; the external environment within which the organization operates; the organizations ability to add value to what it does. The last one may be r egarded as culture in the organization.

However, the culture of an organization is something that can have an enormous impact on the way in which an organization operates, and its effectiveness. It is also something that can be assessed and, if necessary, changed over time.Culture is the social glue that provides boundary-defining roles, conveys a sense of identity for organization members and serves as a “sense-making” and control mechanism that guides and shapes the attitudes and behavior of employees.Cross-cultural management issues arise in a number of situations, such as within a firm (work attitudes, achievement motivation, time and future and ethics, etc.); between firms (joint ventures, alliances and buyer-supplier relationships); between a firm and customers (dealing with customers). All this directly influences key points in strategic management. That is why any organization develops and implements its own corporate culture.Corporate culture is a term used to characterize, how the managers and employees of particular companies tend to behave. It is an organization’s value system and its collection of guiding principles. Values are often seen in conjunction with mission or vision statement at the stage of strategic management. Culture is reflected by management policies and actions. So, it may be concluded that culture and values are strongly influenced by the top executives.Corporate culture can also be defined as patterns of behavior based on mutual values and ways of thinking within a certain corporate. As it has been already mentioned, each company has its own norms of behavior, which help its members to understand what the organization represents.Corporate culture is also used by human resource managers and senior management in their attempts to proactively shape the kind of behavior (“innovative”, “open”, “dynamic”, etc.) they hope to nurture in their organizations. Promoting a distinctive corporate culture is also expected to enhance the sense of community and shared identity that underpins effective organizations.Hofstede’s idea of culture lies in the statement that every person has patterns of thinking, feeling and potential acting. Culture is the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes the members of one group of people from another.Organizational culture consists of a complex set of ideologies, symbols, and core values shared throughout the firm and influence the way business is conducted. It shapes the context within which the firm formulates and implements it's strategies and also helps to regulate and control employees’ behaviorThere are many things that make up a company’s culture and many places that is comes fromOnce developed, a company’s culture tends to last because:Organizations hire people who fit the firm and its culture;Employees learn by observing the behavior of others and through socialization and systematic indoctrination of cultural values;Storytelling of company legends and ceremonies that honor employees who display cultural ideals;Visibly rewarding those who follow cultural norms.Culture influences strategic management in a number of ways: work attitudes (for example, work ethics, organization commitment, etc.); achievement motivation (the desire to accomplish objectives and achieve success); time and future (for example: punctuality, decision-making time constraints, time expectations on implementation of plans, etc.); ethics (standards of conduct and morality).