NATIONAL AND ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

DO YOU THINK CORPORATE CULTURE IS A WAY TO MANIPULATE EMPLOYEES?

Before answering the question, I believe is important to think that when we talk about corporate culture we are just having a look in a small part of an entire environment, which is full of people, believes, attitudes and so on. That is why to have a better idea of that specific topic; it is necessary first to identify the big meaning of being inside of an entire National culture. Many people believe, that according to the place where the corporation is located, the norms established inside it are going to change, due to the fact that behaviours inside are going to be reflected in accordance with the external environment.

The culture in each place of the world represents a big influential factor in any company because the way in how people take decisions, how we relate to each other, the way that we preferred to be organized inside the corporation and so on, are attitudes that were created thanks to a cultural base that was “injected” in our unconscious part. There are many ideas that came from something bigger than as, something that can be called the environment that surround us or the national culture that creates some ideas which lead us to have a specific conception of the world and therefore, at the end, make us act in the way we do.

Picture : “students boast cultures at international fair” retrieved on march 1 from : http://tech.mit.edu/V117/N22/ifair.22n.html

If we put together, in a company, a group of people from diverse parts of the world, we will probably see that all of them have different behaviours for any situation, unless the existence of a strong CORPORATE CULTURE inside it.

What does it means to have a strong corporate culture? The corporate culture represents a group of assumptions, norms and practices that people in an organization adopt over time, but when it is too strong, all the differences that represents each person as individuals, disappear due to unconscious changes or just because of the wants and needs of the company to be in that way. In my opinion, and in an easiest way to explain this situation, and to solve the initial proposal, it can be call or be seen as a manipulation strategy of the company, where ad been too strong, it doesn’t respect the individual characters as a rich source of growth for the corporation.

As a conclusion, I think it is not bad when companies establish different rules that are needed to guide and control employees, rules that can become corporate cultural assumptions; but when those norms start to erase the differences among us, that are part of our personal believes or our “essence”, they become a way of manipulation, where at the end the only actor that takes advantage of it is the company while the employees are losing their selves.

Picture: retrieved on march 1 from: http://victormconde.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/changing_organizational_culture_software-93589.jpg