FACULTY OF CIVIL ENGINEERING

PRINCIPLE OF MANAGEMENT
(UABA 0013)

ASSIGNMENT 1:
IMPACT OF A STRONG CULTURE ON ORGANIZATIONS
AND MANAGERS

NAME : QURRATU AINI BT SIAT @ SIRAT

IC NO : 931010-13-6186
MATRIC NO : MKA161173
LECTURER : DR DR ABDUL RAHIM B. ABDUL
HAMID
1.0 Introduction

Before discuss on the impact of a strong culture on organizations and managers, it is

important to have an insight of a culture and a strong culture. So, what is culture? There are
many definition of a culture and from a wide literature, culture can defined as an arrangement
of different attributes that express an organization and differentiate the firm from other one
(Forehand and von Gilmer, 1964). According to Hofstede (1980), culture is the collective
thinking of minds which create a difference between the members of one group from another.
Schein (1990) claimed that culture as a set of different values and behaviors that may considered
to guide a success. As for Kotter and Heskett (1992), culture means fairly established set of
beliefs, behaviors and values of society contain generally. Based on these definition, we can
conclude that culture is a gained communication, knowledge, beliefs, values, and behaviors of
a large group of people, at the same time and same place. However, the culture of one
organization is not the same with one another where the different of culture based on the
multifaceted set of beliefs, values and assumptions that determine ways to organizations
conducted its business. The organizational culture can take of two forms: strong or weak.
Strong culture is a culture of organization where the beliefs is strong, where the greater
part of the employees embraced the same sorts of beliefs and values as concern to the
organization (Deal and Kennedy, 1982). According to Madu (2012), a strong culture
organizational culture refers to the set of beliefs that are strongly adhered to and shared widely
within the organization, but such a culture requires the organization to do more culture specific
investments, and such a culture is unlikely to change. This implies that in this form of culture,
organization should take serious actions to instill and spread its norms and values to its
employees. Ehteshamul and Muhammed (2011) claimed that the strength of the organization
culture is determined by the level of shared meaning of principles, norms and values and the
more universal the meaning is shared among the Organization’s members, the stronger the
culture. Besides, strong culture also where the employees’ goals are aligned to the
organization’s goals and strong culture impacts towards an organizations and managers which
will be further discuss in the next sub topic.

2.0 Impacts of Strong Culture on Organizations

The strong organizational culture is very essential for any organizations because of three
(3) important functions which are as follows:

1) Organizational culture is extremely fixed with the social control that may cause to make
influence on the employee’s decisions and behaviour
2) Organizational culture works as social glue to bond the employees together and make
them feel a strong part of the corporate experience, which is useful to attract new staff
and retain the best performers.
3) Organizational culture is very useful to assist the sense making process, helps the
employees to understand the organization events and objectives, which enhance the
efficiency and effectiveness of the employees.
 Technically, there are strong associations between culture and performance. By
definition, performance refers to the degree of achievement of the mission at work place that
builds up an employee job (Cascio, 2006) and the term of performance can be used to express
the range of measurements of transactional efficiency and also input and output efficiency
(Stannack, 1996). According to Deal and Kennedy (1982), strong culture have a great impact
on the organizational behaviour where the employee’s goals are side with the goal of
management and lead to increase the overall organizational performance. Kotter and Heskett
(1992), conduct a study and find that organizational performance of increasing culture or strong
culture raised the income of the organizations up 765% between 1977 and 1988, and only 1%
increase in a same period of time firms without performance enhancing culture (Gallagher,
2008). Figure 1 below describes the percentage difference between the net income of firms
with performance enhancing culture and without performance enhancing culture, which proves
the effect of strong organization culture on the increase in the net income of the organizations
within given study period.

Figure 1: Effect on Culture on Growth Income (Source: Sean Gallagher et.al (2008))

Moreover, strong culture has almost considered as a driven force to improve the
performance of the employees where it enhances the self-confidence and commitment of the
employees thus reduces job stress and improves the ethical behaviour of the employees
(Saffold, 1998) where the impact of strong organizational culture on employee behavior and
performance is based on 4 important ideas (Bulach, Lunenburg, & Potter, 2012).

Firstly, having knowledge of the organization culture permits employees to understand

the history and functioning of the organization. This knowledge provides information about
projected future behaviors. Secondly, strong organizational culture raises devotion to the
organization's philosophy and values. This commitment creates shared feelings of achieving
common goals. It means organizations can achieve greater success only when employees share
values.
 Thirdly, organizational culture, with its norms, deal as a control mechanism to direct
behaviors toward expected behaviors and away from unfavorable behaviors. This can also be
achieved by recruiting, selecting, and retaining employees whose values match with the values
of the organization. This type of organizational culture may be linked directly to greater
efficiency and performance than others.

3.0 Impacts of Strong Culture on Managers

An organization’s culture has an effect on what employees do depending on how strong

or weak the culture is. Strong cultures for those in which the key values are deeply held and
widely shared have a greater influence on employees than do weaker cultures. The stronger a
culture becomes, the more it affects what employees do and the way managers plan, organize,
lead, and control. A company strong culture can and should tremendously impacts on the
attitudes of managers.
Firstly, strong culture may affect the managers’ motivation. When a company string
culture demonstrates its values by singularly tying achievement to managers’ ability to move
ahead with the company, the attitudes of managers can be either positively or negatively
affected, depending on what drives the individual. For example, a culture stated as, “Our
company rewards leadership that focuses on producing new ideas and inventive thinking,”
could do one of two things: It might positively influence a manager's can-do, problem-solving
attitude, resulting in rapid advancement, or it could overwhelm leaders who may excel in other
necessary business functions, such as finance, which may not offer many opportunities to
provide innovative ideas. The attitudes of these managers could become contrary toward their
potential for advancement.

Secondly, it also affect the manager with regards to leadership within the organization.
A company culture can alter a manager’s attitude toward leadership. For example, an employee-
centric strong culture might be expressed with a statement such as, “Our company’s culture
asserts our fundamental belief that leaders are cultivated from within our ranks; we consistently
work from this precept.” When this type of cultural environment consistently supports and
grooms managers through training and similar investments, subsequent leadership possesses
attitudes that, in turn, foster internal employee growth.

Thirdly, managers with strong values match up with company strong cultures purporting
high ethical standards in all business dealings. During the course of business, circumstances
may require a test of these standards, such as when an ethical question arises from an improper
marketing-related decision. Business owners can fall back on the company’s culture to hold
offending managers accountable, thereby retaining the culture's validity. Failing to do so can
tarnish for managers the company’s belief structure, transforming attitudes into those that may
detrimentally ignore breaches in ethics standards.
 In addition, organizations with a strong culture, that culture can substitute for the rules
and regulations that formally guide employees. In essence, strong cultures can
create predictability, orderliness, and consistency without the need for written documentation.
Therefore, the stronger an organization’s culture, the less managers need to be concerned with
developing formal rules and regulations. Instead, those guides will be internalized in employees
when they accept the organization’s culture. However, on the other hand of if an organization’s
culture is weak where no dominant shared values are present, it will effect on employee
behavior is less clear compare to organization having the strong culture.

4.0 Conclusion

Culture is being investigated to impact miscellany of organizational process. Positive

development is easier to achieve when everyone is on a common path in the organization.
Hence, strong organizational culture has a deep impact on the performance of employees that
can cause to improve in the productivity and enhance the organizational performance. Strong
organizational cultures offer more advantages towards organization such as increased in
organizational performance by increase the net income of the organizations and improve the
ethical behavior, motivation and performance of the employees.

Since strong organizational culture has a great impact on motivation, and motivated
employees take pride in their job and feel responsible for success of the organization, it is
important for managers to identify proper ways to use organizational culture to motivate their
employees. Besides, since the organization having the same perception of values and beliefs
can make employees to have a strong connection with each other and also with the organization,
hence the employees have a strong feeling and motivate each other. Overall, Positive
development is easier to achieve when everyone is on a common path in the organization. It is
viewed in this particular study that strong organizational culture is very helpful for the new
employees to adopt the organizational culture and to get the competitive advantage under the
particular conditions.Employee’s commitment and group efficiency plays very crucial role to
adopt the value and beliefs of the organization and enhancing the performance of the
organization.
5.0 References

Bulach, C., Lunenburg, F. C., & Potter, L. (2012). Creating a Culture for high performing
schools: A comprehensive approach to school reform. Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield.

Cascio, W. F. (2006). Managing Human Resources: Productivity, Quality of Life, Profits.

McGraw-Hill Irwin.

Deal, T.E. and Kennedy, A.A. (1982). Corporate cultures: The Rites and Rituals of
Corporate Life. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Ehteshamul M, Muhammad, SA (2011) Impact of Organizational Culture on Performance

management practices in Pakistan. Department of Management Sciences, COMSASTS
Institute of information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan.

Forehand, G. A. and Von Gilmer, (1964). Environmental Variations in Studies of

Organizational Behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 62, 361-382.
Karlsen JT, (2011) Supportive Culture for Efficient Project Uncertainty Management. Int J
Managing Projects in Bus, 4: 240-256.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences, Sage London.

Kotter, J. P. & Heskett, J. L. (1992). Corporate culture and performance. New York: Free
Press.

Madu BC (2012) Organizational culture as driver of competitive advantage. JABE 5:1-9

Saffold, G.S. (1998). Culture Traits, Strength, and Organizational Performance: Moving
beyond Strong Culture. The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 13, 546-558

Schein, E. H. (1990). Organizational culture. American Psychologist, 43 (2), 109-119.

Stannack, P. (1996). Perspective on Employees Performance. Management Research News,

l19(4/5), 38-40.