Cultural Differences In Organizational Culture

We use the Cultural Web firstly to look at organizational culture as it is now, and then look at how we want the culture to be. We then finally identify the differences between the two. These differences are the changes we need to make to achieve the high-performance culture that we want.

(Johnson and Scholes, 1988)

These include:

Stories – The companies past. Says a lot about what company deems as acceptable.

Rituals and Routines – behaviour and actions of employees.

Symbols – The visual representations of the company including logos, how plush the offices are, and the formal or informal dress codes.

Organizational Structure – The company’s power structure and who’s contributions are most valued.

Control Systems – How the company is controlled.

(Cummings & Worley, 2004, p. 491 – 492) displays the following guidelines for cultural change:

Formulate a clear strategic vision. “In order to make a cultural change effective a clear vision of the firm's new strategy, shared values and behaviours is needed. This vision provides the intention and direction for the culture change” (Cummings & Worley, 2004, p. 490).

Display top-management commitment. Cummings states that “a change in culture must be managed from the top of the organization, as willingness to change senior management is an important indicator” (Cummings & Worley, 2004, page 490). The top of the organization should be very much in favour of the change in order to actually implement the change in the rest of the organization.

Model culture change at the highest level. In order to show that the management team is in favour of the change, the change has to be notable at first at this level. The behaviour of the management needs to symbolize the kinds of values and behaviours that should be realized in the rest of the

This can be fixed if leaders invested time into establishing and maintaining positive relationships with staff as well as somehow expressing genuine concern for their past mistakes instead of constantly making excuses. Respect is important in a corporate culture, and therefore VW need to show staff that they are a respectful company who respect their staff. This may require a change in leadership by appointing someone with a slightly better reputation than the current VW leaders, in order to gain back the trust of their