Types of organizational culture
Team-oriented Culture
Team-oriented companies hire for culture fit first, skills and experience second. A company with a team-first corporate culture makes employees’ happiness its top priority. Frequent out-of-office team activities, opportunities to provide meaningful feedback, and flexibility to accommodate employees’ family lives are common markers of a team-first culture. The understanding of team-oriented culture is making employees happy, who will, in turn, make the customers happier. Team-oriented culture is beneficial for any customer service-focused company because employees are more likely to be satisfied with their work and eager to show their gratitude by going the extra mile for customers.
Safety Corporate Culture
Safety corporate culture is about creating or developing a sense of protection and the ability to anticipate organizational changes. As such, determining the various organizational factors such as employees in shaping safety can assist in developing a more effective safety program. Safety corporate culture enables employees to feel included in organizational changes, particularly those who prefer careful planning.
Horizontal Corporate Culture
Organizations with horizontal cultures are also referred to as flat organizations. The culture encourages flexibility by enabling employees to try out new strategies as per market research and customer feedback. This type of culture is mostly found within startups as it allows for a collaborative environment where everyone pitches their ideas.
For instance, some companies boast of an open door policy whereby anyone can freely approach a colleague, including management, whenever they have a concern or need clarification. Open communication supported by horizontal culture eventually promotes openness and trust in a company.
Conventional Corporate Culture
This is an old-fashioned approach to management and in most cases, the company’s bottom line is always the priority. These organizations will stick to the old ways of doing things with the aim of achieving consistency and results. The reliance on practice makes the uptake of new technology hard for these companies.
For example, companies where ties or slacks are mandatory, and the rewards are mainly monetary, are typical of the conventional sort. However, because of the changing business landscape, the conventional corporate culture is increasingly under threat such as from digital communication devices.
Progressive Corporate Culture
Progressive corporate culture is characterized by constant changes that often leave employees not sure of what to expect next. The major transitions may be internal such as the case of mergers and acquisitions. They can also be external in the case of changes in the market. Companies may need to adjust their goals and objectives to fit those of the market. Hence, the organization’s leadership have a critical responsibility to communicate to its stakeholders such as employees to ensure they do not lose focus.
The major advantage of progressive corporate culture is that companies have to be innovative and creative to meet the emerging trends. These eventually lead to the development of new ideas and improvements that benefit the company in the long run.
Importance of organizational culture
Attracting Top Talent
The current job market heavily favors candidates. The best candidates have the option of choosing where to work. They further have the advantage to get a view of the internal work environment of a company through platforms such as Glassdoor and can also connect with the company employees through social media channels such as LinkedIn. This shift, therefore, calls for companies to come up with initiatives that will appeal to potential employees.
Save your time!
We can take care of your essay
- Proper editing and formatting
- Free revision, title page, and bibliography
- Flexible prices and money-back guarantee
For example, organizations need to keep the existing employees engaged by ensuring that they are productive or they feel part of the organization. When the employees are happy, they are more likely to become recruitment ambassadors for the company. Companies should therefore strive to win their internal clients over through culture given it is key in deriving job satisfaction (Alniack, Alniack, Erat, &Akcin, 2014).
Boosting Employee Engagement
Boosting employee engagement is vital for the long-term productivity of employees within an organization. Engaged employees display great commitment toward their work and have a genuine motivation to exceed their goals. Great company culture plays a major role in providing clarity on the roles of different individuals in the organization. When employees connect with the company culture, it gives their day-to-day tasks a broader purpose and they feel like they do meaningful work. It further gives them the energy to be at work, infuses a deep sense of ownership, and promotes employee loyalty.
Improving Employee Retention
Individuals want to work for organizations whose goals and objectives resonate with theirs. Building a better business culture that will continuously keep the employees engaged is essential in improving employee retention. Leaders and their organizations must strive to implement employee retention procedures or practices such as continuously providing employee training and support and providing them with guidance. When employees feel valued by their organization, they are likely to stay. The challenge is in making the employees feel valued, of which, possible strategies include empowering employees, rewarding them, and offering them job security.
Bolsters Employer Brand
Employer brand refers to a company’s reputation. It is mostly based on the organization’s products, employees, office set up and more. In an increasingly competitive labor market, bolstering employer brand is crucial in organizations. This is because it impacts how a company is viewed by its current employees as well as prospective employees and customers. The process of building a strong employer brand is strengthened by building a culture that assists employees to internalize the desired brand image and motivation to project a given brand to customers.
Shaping organization culture through leadership
The Role of Leadership in Defining Company Culture
Leadership is integral in defining a company’s culture. Leaders are the ones who make or break it because they are the ones tasked with making choices in the organization such as employee recruitment or engagement (Ssczepanska-Woszczyna, 2015). The role of leadership in defining company culture is about developing behaviors, systems, and processes surrounding the way things are done; ideals, goals, values, and aspirations set by leadership; and the underlying assumptions that will guide behavior.
The Role of Leadership in Hiring For Culture Fit
Cultural fit refers to the glue that holds the organization together. Hiring for cultural fit requires that individuals are hired based on the existing organizational culture framework. As such, the work of leadership is to define and articulate the organization’s culture, values, and practices. This process ought to benefit the company. For example, proper hiring decisions will ensure the minimization of employee turnover.
The Role of Leadership in Sustaining a Strong Company Culture
Leadership provides the basis through which culture can be used to empower employees. This should be to an extent where the employees are able to attain the company’s mission and realize the importance of individual contributions to furthering the realization of specific goals. In essence, good leadership ought to demonstrate the beliefs of the company whilst reinforcing them in such a manner that building and sustaining a strong company culture is attainable.
Analysis and conclusion
Analysis
Leadership is important in the creation or development of organizational culture. Leadership's role in shaping organizational culture is something that has been identified extensively in literature. Leadership choices influence organizational culture outcomes, to begin with(Ssczepanska-Woszczyna, 2015). Additionally, the development of leadership can lead to the improvement of organizational culture, which is beneficial to the company in various fronts such as the realization of job satisfaction (Alniack et al. 2014), improving employee engagement, and building a strong employer brand. In essence, leadership behavior heavily impacts organizational culture and can either lead to healthy or bad company culture. The understanding is that leaders need to be adequately prepared to react to different circumstances and must be careful because they have the power to either promote a healthy or unhealthy organizational culture.
Conclusion
Leadership and culture are two interrelated concepts that can lead to organizational productivity or improved performance in the long term. Hence, it is important for leaders to examine their behaviors, skills, and thoughts, and apply relevant concepts in a bid to benefit from positive organizational culture. To this end, the organization that properly assesses the impact of its organizational culture will benefit more as compared to one that does not.
Stuck on your essay?
