On the first subject of this post the question was to make an essay about answering the questions "Do you think there is a corporate culture in every organisation?- If we assume there is: Can it be modified?- How does it affect processes that require a deep organisational change?" So here is the essay:
"When a company makes news because of high achievement or high crimes, "corporate culture" often receives the credit or the blame." nnn Gregory Millman
The quotation shown above indicates that there is a corporate culture in every organization. But how true is that quote out of the context in which it was found, mainly because Mr. Millman expresses his unconformity for the use of the term "corporate culture" as it was the cause of every wrong doing in the companies. But the corporate culture is not easily identified as the cause of these behaviors nor changing it is as easy as made see by some of the advisors quoted in the document "Corporate Culture: more myth than reality? ." of Gregory Millman.
Thus why did I state that every company has a corporate culture? because parting from the concept given by Hofstede of what is culture (which includes values and the differentiation of one group from another) one may induce that every company has some sort of corporate culture, even those with high turnover rates.
The reason for this is that there is a material culture and this one is associated with the use of technologies as expressed in the chapter one of the book written by Richard Meade, "International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions". So there is a culture even being only how does a company uses the technologies. It must be recognized thou that culture takes a long time to form and to be attached to the deeper layers of the personality of an individual, but it must be remembered that there are shallow aspects of culture to which one can relate to, for example working late doing monthly reports, etc. because that is the particular way things get done in that particular company which differentiates it from the rest of the companies (similar to Hofstede's definition).
Now it must be recognized that not all the corporate cultures are as strong. It is expected that th bigger the turnover rate the weaker the corporate culture will be , also there are corporate structures that do not foster strong corporate cultures; an example of this type of structure is the project structure of Apple Inc. (Millman, Gregory J, 2007).
So once it is clear that in my opinion corporate culture exists within every organization is it easy to change? I think in this case I agree with Mr. Millman, to change culture takes a lot of time specially when it is deeply rooted in the individuals and is too intertwined with the national culture.
Allow me to explain myself; in first place the corporate culture will take a really long time to change if it does at all, making it useless to face market trends because once the culture has changed it will have to change again, so it is not useful. In the second case where culture actually never changes, is because the changes presented are merely a response an external factor, taking the example from Gregory Millman, a boss that may encourage people to do things differently, but when he/she disappears things will be done once again as they used to get done, so no change really happened. All of the previous happens because the behaviors are so unconscious that people very often do not even know they're following cultural patterns or worst because the change which is trying to be made is not to the corporate culture but rather to the national culture which is harder yet to change and impossible for a company, as stated in the book previously quoted.
Therefore changing corporate culture is not that important rather to face changes; instead of changing the corporate culture use it to create synergies that allow those changes to be implemented swiftly and fast. This can be the case of mergers and acquisitions were the role of culture is really important.
Up to this point the reader may be thinking that is worthless to change corporate culture, but no, it is not; some times the corporate culture in a company is so bad that it causes all sort of problems to the employees (late working hours, no vacations because you will find you've be replaced when you come back from them, etc.) or it is no longer adjusted to present situations (such as using typewriters in 2010 instead of PC). So these types of corporate culture need to be changed in order to avoid loosing all of your human talent and thus competitive advantages, but remember it will take long and it will be hard.
Further readings:
Millman, Gregory J. . 2007. "Corporate Culture: more myth than reality? ." The Free Library 23:44-47. Millman, Gregory J. (2007, July 1).
Mead, Richard. 2004. International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions London: Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 1.
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