How culture affects manager?

How culture affects manager?

Corporate culture (sometimes called organizational culture) can have a demonstrable effect on a company's employees, from top to bottom. Organizational focus has changed dramatically from the 1940s, '50s, and 60s to its status today. Until the 1970s and '80s, most companies were operated in an authoritarian mode: Ownership and management made all decisions. Since then, corporate culture, the merger of attitudes, values, beliefs, organization goals and objectives, employee diversity and image, has evolved into a multi-faceted ongoing reality.
As most senior officers have discovered, corporate culture cannot simply be mandated by management nor can it be simply implemented or changed to apply to an entire staff through managers' actions alone. While senior management has a responsibility to provide direction and policies and procedures, establishing a positive corporate culture that reflects the image, efficiency, profitability, and philosophy of your company is usually a more cooperative project, which includes input from employees at all levels of responsibility.
Employee performance, individually and collectively, can be affected, positively or negatively, by the corporate culture you embrace, whether you supervise many people or no one at all. If you agree with your company's preferred culture, you will act accordingly. However, if the organizational focus of your employer is opposed to your personality, professional goals, etc., you may resist conforming to the culture as you perceive it. Either approach will have an effect on your performance. If you manage a group, department, or division, your outward attitude and posture, will have an effect on your staff.
At times an official corporate culture can be in conflict with certain departments. For instance, assume one of the components of your company's corporate culture is the maintenance of reserved behavior and low key decorum. This may work well with your executive-level employees, customer service and accounting departments, and purchasing staff. But, what about your company's sales department, often populated by outspoken, opinionated, high energy professionals? If the reservation and modest decorum culture is imposed on this group, your company may risk both declining sales volume and the loss of one or more marketing stars, who might feel stifled by this philosophy. How you as a manager and your company handle this potential conflict can become important to the firm's operating results. If you can merge your corporate culture with your employees' personalities and skills, you might improve the performance of the whole group.
Suppose your company's corporate culture has a "family friendly" component. If this feature is known in your industry, your firm may attract some excellent employees, who are also dedicated to their families. Most companies that adopt this feature are comfortable with this component and with their operating results. Sometimes, however, this philosophy comes in conflict with a bottom line-oriented finance and accounting department. Why? The cost of a family-friendly culture, possibly including extra personal days, company-sponsored family events (outings, holiday parties, etc.), or top-of-the-line health benefits, may be higher than usual. The rewards of this corporate culture component may be much more difficult to measure. Even those finance professionals who are family-oriented might struggle with this philosophy since their performance may be judged on operating results and cost control.
As the perceived importance of corporate culture has increased, so has the number and variety of "experts" and think tank professionals commenting on, defining, measuring, recommending, quantifying, and suggesting the components of a "strong" or "weak" corporate culture. An employee or manager should determine what their employer's corporate culture really embodies. Whether you manage a four-person group or an international division, you should know the major components of your organizational culture and use it to improve employees' performance.
If the personalities of some or your entire group are not necessarily impassioned by some features of your corporate culture, you should find a way to provide superior leadership within the parameters of your firm's philosophy. For instance, assume key features of your organization's culture are family-friendly policies, but your group is a diverse mix of 20-somethings. While a family-friendly corporate culture may not hurt your employees' performance, you might want to develop motivation techniques that emphasize other, possibly less prominent features (e.g., physical fitness, education support, aggressive innovation, etc.) of your firm's culture.
Understanding the day-to-day corporate culture that your employer embraces is more important than passionately supporting or tacitly disagreeing with it. Knowing that a corporate culture will affect all employees' performance, for better or worse, can be a key factor to help you manage people. Those managers who discount the influence of corporate culture on employee performance will probably face some unnecessary challenges because of the diversity of the modern workforce. Some employees will fit into a corporate culture as they would a custom made piece of clothing, while others will sometimes be less comfortable with the unwritten, but well known preferences of your company.
It doesn't matter whether some experts might classify your corporate culture as strong, weak, or neutral. What matters is that it exists and you have some understanding of what it is. You can then implement motivation and performance methods that help your company achieve its goals and objectives. You should adopt those approaches that are effective with the people in your group or department individually, which, when combined, may develop into a high performing team.