115 Posts Found

Structure influences behavior. When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

It’s clear to me that you can never have a single culture in an international company. Cultures are molded by countries, by fiscal systems, by the systems people work in—they’re different from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States, and they’re different in Sweden, Norway and Japan. Anyone who believes they can impose a single corporate culture across a global company … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sir William Castell | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior

Culture is the outcome of the shared experiences arising out of an organization’s attempts to resolve fundamental problems of adapting to the external world and achieving internal integration and consistency.

Content: Quotation | Author: Edgar H. Schein | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

It’s is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of acting.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Action, Culture, Thought

It’s very hard to figure out which capabilities are most important, which aspect of “the way things are done around here” is the one that leads to superior performance. Sometimes people in an organization don’t know why their own capability is successful. They attribute their success to the wrong factors.

Content: Quotation | Author: David J. Teece | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Getting the right mix of strategy and culture creates a formula for business success. Pursuing a strategy of innovation in a dynamic market can only succeed within an inquisitive culture where the workforce pushes boundaries and management encourages new ideas and constructive risk-taking. Similarly, pursuing a strategy of high-volume, low-cost processes can only succeed within a disciplined culture where the workforce operates in an efficient, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Ira Gaberman, Marieke Witjes | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

There’s a huge degree of variation in organizations, even in the same industry, and a lot of it depends on the extent to which the behavior [kindness] is encouraged, trained, and rewarded. We know from the research on management that there’s a tendency toward attraction, selection, and attrition: People who are kind, generous, and compassionate tend to be attracted to and be selected by organizations … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Olivia O’Neill | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Technologies seldom change culture by themselves; they might enable change in significant ways, yet without new ideas that question our sense of right and wrong they matter less. …The very act of creating a market […] of these products that go against conventions and norms of what we value, and of what we think is appropriate, means that you have to change what we think … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mukti Khaire | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, IT / Technology / E-Business

People think that being values-based is about being nice. It’s really about being principled. You have to be firm, consistent, and even ruthless about your principles, and very few companies are.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dov Seidman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior, Values

Culture matters, enormously. Studies have shown again and again that there may be no more critical source of business success or failure than a company’s culture — it trumps strategy and leadership. That isn’t to say that strategy doesn’t matter, but rather that the particular strategy a company employs will succeed only if it is supported by the appropriate cultural attributes.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Barry Jaruzelski, John Loehr, Richard Holman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Strategy

Really great firms give people a fair amount of independence. They don’t control the people. They control the culture rather than the individuals…Culture influences people every day – it’s what guides them to act when management is not looking.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Tierney | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior

The three things you need to make money are the right strategy, the right people and the right behavior. Strategy matters most when there is turmoil but it is only about 10 per cent of the answer because implementing strategy is so challenging. People and behavior are 90 per cent of the equation.

Culture and leadership are hard to copy. There’s no such thing as … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Tierney | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

The ability to diagnose the beneficial attributes of a culture, and then use them to motivate strategically important behavior, is one of the key factors that differentiate peak-performing organizations from the also-rans in their field.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Ashley Harshak, Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Culture

A corporate culture takes some of its attributes from the professional and educational background of participants. An electronics engineering–driven company has a very different cultural ambiance from a pharmaceutical firm, a bank, or a “metal-bending” manufacturer. Culture is also influenced by the attitudes of the founders, the location of the headquarters, the types of customers that the company serves, and the experiences people have together. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Ashley Harshak, Jon R. Katzenbach | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Culture is multifaceted, and every company has many subcultures. At the top, there might be an executive subculture, trained in finance, which wants good numbers above all else. There’s also probably an engineering subculture, which assumes that crises can be prevented only with fail-safe, redundant systems that kick in automatically. There are other subcultures for middle management, supervisors, the union, and marketing. Every company combines … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Edgar H. Schein | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Culture, Organizational Behavior

Capabilities are the things we do well; culture is all the things we do, including those we do badly.

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas A. Stewart | Source: BNET | Subject: Culture

In a conflict between strategy and culture, culture eventually wins. Always.

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas A. Stewart | Source: BNET | Subjects: Culture, Strategy

An organization’s conception of human capital is manifest in its culture, and culture is inculcated by process and behavior guidelines that are passed along as one employee imitates another. The process is most effective when the capacity for self-expression in the ranks is consonant with expectations set at the top and an autonomous spirit flourishes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Companies should not presume to treat all employees—or customers, for that matter—in a single country as having the same culture or national identity, even in developed nations. Many of today’s employees have spent long periods of time in more than one country, creating sustained connections that deeply affect spending and consumption (for example, continued remittances to family in home countries), social ties, gender roles and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Karen Crennan, Marcia A. Halfin, Paul F. Nunes | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subjects: Culture, International

People tend to only look at national culture when they go into international negotiations—but there is also educational culture, race culture, gender culture, a religious culture. All of these also impact the way people behave and they are all “cross cultural,” which means that we’re underestimating the role of culture because we are only looking at the national one; but as negotiators, we need to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Horacio Falcao | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, International, Negotiation