chapter 12

Group 4
Chapter 12
Culture: inside and out

This chapter will explore both macro (dominant) and micro (corporate) culture and strategies to understand and work effectively within it. Culture is the most profound unseen force. Cultural values can still be perceived and recognized by people.
From a macro perspective, culture is a communally produced and shared model of reality that communicates how a group is expected to behave, think, and feel as a society.
We learn a particular way of life through a process of socialization, which is learning from human interaction. The social knowledge helps to shape both our lifestyle and our self-concept.
Not everyone communicates in the same way we do or values the same things. E.g. if you have excellent communication skills for North America, you will need to adjust your style and learn appropriate behavior in order to communicate effectively with people from other cultures.
In the 21st century, the landscape of business is a diversity of workers from many different backgrounds and perspectives. Mutual respect and consideration for people and their differences are fundamental for both individuals and the organizations in which they work. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own culture is superior to others and it can become barrier that hinders harmony and sabotages productive working relationships. Race-ethnicity refers to inherited biological characteristics of a group (skin color, facial features and other physical variations). It refers to cultural characteristics too.
Different generations of people have different perspectives based on their historical experiences in the world. From a business perspective, stereotypes about age can damage organizational productivity.
Socioeconomic-economic issues can affect a person’s ability to obtain good health care, education, and professional advancement. Antiquated viewpoints are changing, and today it’s more likely to see associating between people with different ranks.
Gender roles are learned throughout our cultural life because we are socialized to expect certain behaviors from men and other behaviors from women. Gender differences shouldn’t affect our perspective of our co-workers, same as physical disabilities shouldn’t too. As a meatier of a fact workers with disabilities are often more reliable than other workers.
A micro view of organizational culture- a corporate culture is the way the organization operates, how it is structured, how members are expected to behave, and what organization believes is important. This culture defines the organization. Organizations are smaller societies, or co-cultures, that exist within the larger national culture. These co-cultures have their own values, beliefs, and codes of behavior.
A deep culture is the organization’s identity, what it believes, perceives, and considers important. The elements of deep organizational culture include values, perspective, and vision. Values represent a set of shared principles defining what is important to members of an organization. Values encompass basic beliefs, the feeling or opinions people hold about what is right or true. A perspective is a particular way of thinking about the world. Some perspectives are deeply held attitudes that are shared among organizational members. An attitude is learned inclination toward or away from an idea, object or person. An organization’s vision is its purpose, mission and future direction. The vision emphasizes the importance of reaching company goals.
Those aspects of culture that can be seen, heard, or directly experienced by people are observable culture and it is rich in symbolism. Norms are a series of behavior codes that guide acceptable conduct in an organization. Rites and rituals are various activities, ceremonies-particular performance interactions that convey organizational values. They can unite employees as a team. Heroes are organizational members who best demonstrate and symbolize company values.
Every corporate culture has its own lore, stories or legends shared by members that reveal company history. Lore provides vivid, dramatic insights into how members believe the organization really works. While employees share numerous stories that describe how things work in a company, these are four main themes to lore: “how does the company feel about rule breaking”, “is the boss human”, “will I get fired”, and “how does the company deals with obstacles”.
In 21st century, with such a vast diversity in business and all around the globe, we should foster and practice our own culture but also be respectful and familiar with others, leaving no room to prejudge.