Evolution of corporate culture: how important is it in today's world?
There are a lot of distinctive and competing definitions of "corporate culture" in the organizational theory literature. On one particular end of the spectrum culture is basically defined as the patterns of behavior within the organization (Smircich, 1983). On the other end, some theorists have defined organizational culture as a program of shared cognitions and the human thoughts generates the culture by indicates of a finite number of rules (Fiol, 1991). While all the theorists think in the significance of the culture in the organizational research but nevertheless there is a lack of consensus over its precise definition (Papers4you.com, 2006). Theorists have accepted this fact and approached the idea of culture from the most widely utilized definition of culture, as defined by Lismen et al (2004) "a complex set of values, beliefs, assumptions, and symbols that define the way in which a firm conducts its company".
The evolution of corporate culture inside an organization has been the center of discussion for countless years. Practitioners have referred to as it the ‘way we do issues about here' (Hampden-Turner, 1990) and the theorists have named it as the ‘collective programming of the mind' (Siew & Kelvin, 2004) which distinguishes one group from a different. Culture reflects the identifiable components of practices, customs, beliefs and values:
Practices: These represents the surface level of a culture i.e. the visible components such as language, etiquette, form of greeting, clothing, and also include the artifacts of the business i.e. the physical layout. These practices do have relevance as it greases the functionality of the organization. Such practices preserve the workers motivated, concerned and even transform everyone to adhere to the related path as every person in order to achieve the popular corporate objective.