What is Corporate Culture? and how HR practitioners can influence it and build the right culture?
Culture is a set of behaviors, habits and ways of doing things during a period of management that is governed by society, regulation, and style. Thus, in business world, Corporate Culture can be simply defined as the way of doing business in an organization and how employees talk to each other. It is the personality of an organization. However, please remember that corporate culture is not the vision and mission statements; rather, it is expressed in the day-to-day practices, communications, and beliefs.
Sun Tzu said, “The Art of War, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations when seeking to determine the conditions obtained in the field. These are: (1) Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) Commander; (5) Method and discipline.”
To begin with, moral Law is defined in various dictionaries and literatures as beliefs, values or ethics followed by people in a society or community. In this interpretation, it refers to organizational culture and how people behave within an organization. Moral law, as explained by Sun Tzu, means that a leader must win his people’s heart, making them think the same things as he does, so that they are willing to make sacrifices for him. Leadership and organizational culture are closely related; the leader may influence organizational culture and vice versa.
Organizational culture is founded on values, beliefs and norms which are embraced by leaders daily – in what they say and what they do – are those that will take root and remain. Leaders, who honor people’s basic need for health, security, recognition, belonging and a sense of purpose in a manner that aligns with cultural traits of an organization, provide an environment that motivates and builds the organizational synergy required to breed success.
Any culture establishes standards of tolerable behavior and an understanding of organizational operating styles. HR practitioners must be able to define organizational culture in order to be able to manage it.
As mentioned in “Search of Excellence”, Peters and Waterman drew a lot of attention to the importance of culture to achieving high levels of organizational effectiveness. Such culture can be instigated in any of HR activities such as recruitment, selection, performance management, reward system, interpersonal communication…etc. HR professionals become “de facto” agents of cultural change.
Therefore, how to develop a culture that benefits the development of an organization has become a very important issue for HR practitioners since HR plays a significant part in the process of embedding it and supporting leaders as they walk the talk.
Corporate culture is, also, shaped by the leaders and purpose of the inception of the company. It then develops within the constraints of the environment, technology, values of the leadership, and performance expectations.
To build the right corporate culture, it is paramount to comprehend both the business and human aspects of an organization; they must go hand in hand. We have to look at the behaviors that exist within the organization, the way in which people interact with each other, their internal relationships, and levels of trust.
Thus, HR can address various aspects of the organization in order to build the right culture, such as policies, procedures and programs, justice, on-going training, creating continuous communication channels, involving employees, establishing clear goals, creating a fair reward system, and developing employees.
To sum up, HR can only be involved in culture if the company allows it.
By: Dr. Mohamed Amr Sadik
EDITOR: Mayar Ahmed
Photography: Ahmed Samir
This article is a product of a writing competition organized by Global HR Forum & HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine. Dr. M. Amr Sadik was honorably one of the shortlisted winners in the HR Writer Competition. Judging Panel: Mahmoud Mansi, Dina Marei, Alia Faramawi, Ahmed Saadalla, Nada Adel Sobhi. General Coordinator: Ms. Nour Elzeny.