Organizational Behavior + National and Organizational Culture

Organizational Behavior

¨Organizational Behavior is the study of individuals and their behavior within the context of the organization in a workplace setting. It is an nterdisciplinary field that includes sociology, psychology, communication and management.¨1

In module one the author describes Organizational Behavior as ¨the individual behavior and group dynamics in organizations. The study of organizational behavior is primarily concerned with the psychosocial, interpersonal, and behavioral dynamics in organizations.¨2

The way I see this term is that it interprets people within the organization relationships in terms of the whole person, whole group, whole organization, and whole social system. The main purpose for this is to build better relationships between the people in the organization by achieving human objectives, organizational objectives, and social objectives.

It is really important to understand the way people act and why they act this way. The human behavior is something really complex. Human behavior is the behaviors exhibited by humans and this behaviors are influenced by different factors such as culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and genetics. Some people might act on a common way, on an unusual way, some on an acceptable way, and some outside the acceptable limits. ¨The acceptability of behavior is evaluated relative to social norms and regulated by various means of social control.¨3 Human behavior has two different perspectives; the internal and the external perspective. ¨The internal perspective explains people’s actions and behavior in terms of their history and personal value systems.¨4 it shows the way how past events in someone’s life can interfere in future behaviors. ¨The external perspective shows that a person’s behavior is best understood by examining the surrounding external events and environmental forces.¨5 People might act and behave on a different way depending on the place and the people that surround them, the external factors influence the way people act.

In an organization people have to adapt to different circumstances and surroundings. Organizations are systems that have people, technology, structure, and purposes. All of them have to interact with elements in the organization’s environment and these is where sometimes people adapt really well or sometimes they just have trouble adapting to the organizations environment. This is one of the many problems a manager can have inside the company. There are three other factors that can become a challenge for managers and the people that make part of the organization: Globalization, workforce diversity and ethics.

There can be two different types of organizations, the formal and the informal. The formal organization has a group of goals, objectives, policies and procedures that define the way that employees should act inside the company. The informal organization is the set of beliefs, assumptions, values, attitudes, feelings and perceptions that determine the way in which workers of a company actually behave. For managers can be a challenge to achieve understanding the behavior of an organization, these can require skills, knowledge and patience in order to analyze and get to an accurate conclusion of what are the reasons that determine the actions of the members in the organization.



National and Organizational Culture

These two terms can be related because one can influence the other one. But before explaining them it is important to understand the definition of culture. Culture according to the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is a definition highly misunderstood and misused, thus the need for an explanation: Culture refers to the following Ways of Life, including but not limited to:

-Language : the oldest human institution and the most sophisticated medium of expression.

-Arts & Sciences : the most advanced and refined forms of human expression.

-Thought : the ways in which people perceive, interpret, and understand the world around them.

-Spirituality : the value system transmitted through generations for the inner well-being of human beings, expressed through language and actions.

-Social activity : the shared pursuits within a cultural community, demonstrated in a variety of festivities and life-celebrating events.

-Interaction : the social aspects of human contact, including the give-and-take of socialization, negotiation, protocol, and conventions.

All of the above are components of the human culture and all of them define the meaning of culture. Together they shape the values, beliefs, morality and arts of the culture, giving the rules and framework for each different social system. These are inputs we get from generations to generations. Our parents teach us their way of living, behaving and acting on different situations and places.

Organizational culture according to Edgar Schein, one of the most prominent theorists of organizational culture, gave the following very general definition. ¨The culture of a group can now be defined as: A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.¨6

A much more simple and brief definition for me is, the beliefs and values shared by all members of the organization and they are reflected on the everyday operations in the organization.

National culture involves characteristics of a specific territory. These characteristics can be their values, languages, religion, art, understandings, assumptions and goals. Those characteristics are shared by the members of a society and passed through generations. Hofstede defines the national culture as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or people from another"7. That is why people all over the world have different ways of assuming life and behaving. National cultures shape strong value systems among their members but the resulting shared values, preferences, and behaviors of population groups differ widely between countries. This can also be seen between different subgroups within a country, so we have to keep in mind that the term “national culture” can be misunderstood because It may be referred to just a part of the population in a given country.

Geert Hofstede created five dimensions in order for people to understand and differentiate countries and their cultures. The dimensions are: Power distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance and Long term orientation. These dimensions can be really useful in order to have a clear view and perspective of a culture. With these dimensions we can compare different countries and find out why they have some issues, act and behave on a different way.

Questions

1. Considering the conference "Dealing with Cultural Differences" by Nick B. Meyer, choose 1 cultural dimension and use 2 hypothetical but realistic situations - or real ones - to illustrate the business implications of cultural differences. You may not use situations or examples already discussed in class or in the conference.

I decided to choose the cultural dimension for masculinity. Masculinity is one of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The meaning he gave to masculinity is: “distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values”.8

Masculinity defines men’s and women’s roles in a country and it also explains if the culture in the country has a masculine or feminism value behavior. All of this can also be seen in organizational cultures because they also have masculine or feminism values and behaviors. For example, in a security and safety company generally the people that work there are men. In these companies they prefer men to be the security guys because they look stronger and have better qualities in order to perform the job. Women are not well seen in these jobs and sometimes the ones that have a security job are not respected as men are. Men are seen as much more coersitive and strong than women and in many countries it is strange to see women working as police officers, driving a taxi, working as security agents, etc. those jobs are masculine.

Another clear example in our culture for masculinity is when a man goes to a bank and needs talk with the manager. When the man enters the office and realizes that the manager is a woman sometimes they feel that that’s not the job for a woman. They even prefer to change to another bank or branch. Some managerial jobs exercised by women are not well accepted in cultures like ours because people tend to think that women are not capable of handling the job in a good way and this generates insecurity to the clients.

2. Do you think there is a corporate culture in every organization? If we assume there is: Can it be modified?

Yes, I think that there is a corporate culture in every organization and that it can be modified. But let’s start by defining corporate culture. “What is corporate culture? It is something that managers have to establish and run all the way through a business, with clear values and beliefs, successful business principles and operations, and a suitable emphasis on human resources and customer satisfaction.”9 In other words managers are the ones in charge of the culture inside their companies and how they are flowing. The culture inside an organization is created by managers and workers on their everyday living. They start creating ways of acting, norms, beliefs, ideals and behaviors. That is why people in an organization start to adapt to those norms, values, beliefs inside their jobs and start to make part of the organizational culture, but for many organizations their existing culture may have good and bad elements that make part of it. This is where managers have to implement their knowledge and try to improve those fallacies.

Organizations have the capability to be modified because they are completely dynamic and depend upon the leaders they have in the moment. Changes depend on the managers and the way they perform and communicate with the workers. It’s obvious that changes are not easy to implement and they can take time but that is why managers have to plan good strategies in order to modify an organizational culture. Many managers have problems identifying the organizational culture and sometimes they try to create one and that is not a good idea. The manager’s job is not to create or invent a new culture, but to identify the one that already exists and try to find out which improvements are needed, develop an action plan and implement it. It’s a good idea to analyze the mission and vision of the company and determine if it is adequate for the future or the idea that the manager has for the company. If not the manager has to modify them and adapt them to the company’s new cultural ideal.

The communication between managers and employees play an important role at the moment in which a cultural modification is trying to be established. Some managers pretend to generate changes without taking into account the workers. It is important to ask them what they think about the organizational culture and what they think that can be improved. With all of this information a manager can create a better plan and probably the modification will take place on a fastest way. Communication should be clear and managers have to talk about what is expected of the company, clarify doubts and define policies. This is important because each member of the company has to be informed and understand what is happening.

To conclude the idea, the company culture is unique and can be modified by managers and workers together. It is important that managers can identify the organizational culture and its failures, and then try to implement a solution with a good communication and understanding by everyone that makes part of the company.

References

1. www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/research/subjectguides/organizationalbehavior.html

2. Mead, Richard. 2004. International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions London: Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 1.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_behavior

4. http://www.orgb4me.com/sample/ORGB_Ch1.pdf

5. http://www.scribd.com/doc/19010954/Introduction-to-the-Field-of-Organizational-Behavior

6. http://www.soi.org/reading/change/culture.shtml

7. http://www.carla.umn.edu/culture/definitions.html

8. http://www.geert-hofstede.com/

9. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/business-management/corporate-culture.php

- http://www.roshan-institute.org/templates/System/details.asp?id=39783&PID=474552

http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/Organizational_Culture_Corporate_Culture_in_Organizations.htm

- http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/

- http://humanresources.about.com/od/organizationalculture/a/culture_change.htm

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