CULTURAL CHANGE

Culture Change- Issues, Challenges and Opportunities



Culture Change- Issues, Challenges and Opportunities

Introduction

In today's world, the only thing that is constant is change. In order to meet your steps with the rest of the world, it is imperative to adopt these changes. But, adoption of change is not an easy task especially in organizations. It becomes difficult in an organization to adopt and accept changes because in an organization, many different people work together in a particular setting and, whenever change is introduced to they resist these changes. Managers adopt variegated forms, techniques and method to implement these changes. Bringing a change in an organization affects each and every aspect of the organization. The main objective of this paper is to talk about organization change. This paper discusses the impact of implementing and managing change on culture of the organization and barriers to implementing change.

Culture

Culture is a shared set of meanings among community of people who develop a common model from shared experiences (Zapf 1991, 106). So, from this statement of Zapf one can say that culture for a different region must be different. Every country of the world has a distinct culture of its own. People living in a particular country relate to the norms and values of the society. There are values that are drastically different in various cultures and societies. The dressing pattern, languages spoken, colours, buildings, architecture et al differ in different cultures. Just like countries and geographical regions, organizations also have their own culture in which organizations work and burgeon (Northouse 2007, 33).

Organizational Culture

Corporate culture can be defined as set of behaviours that are embraced by the organization in adapting to the external environment and internal integration, which showed its effectiveness and shared by the majority members of the organization. There are several definitions of organizational or corporate culture. First and foremost, corporate culture can be defined as learned and applied values and norms by members of the organization that define its behavior, atmosphere or social climate. Organizational culture in the specific cases of companies or governments as a corporate culture or just managerial culture refers to a concept of organizational theory and describes the origins, development and the impact of cultural issues within organizations. The organizational culture affects all aspects of management such as decision making, relationships with colleagues, customers and suppliers, communication, etc. Every activity in an organization is coloured by the culture of the organization. Understanding the organizational culture allows members of the organization to achieve their goals more effectively, and helps the outsiders to understand the organization in a better way and the right way (Schneider & Barsoux 2003, 56).

In an organization when people get together set out to work for business goals, a culture develops naturally. Not many companies try to design and manage their corporate culture and end up having a culture by default. The parallels are drawn to culture of an organization with the personality of a person. A human personality develops naturally but certain factors like education, upbringing, ...