Corporate Culture

Organizations, like individuals, have personalities. Sometimes we find our personalities harmonize with those of other people. Sometimes they clash. So, the culture of the organisation in which we work determines whether our employment is satisfying and congenial or the converse.” (Lysons, 2000, p. 1).

From this citation, we can infer that corporate culture is crucial to firm performance. Culture is invisible and hard to deal with. Negative culture can be devastating to company’s mission, goals, and objectives. However, positive culture itself can be significant to competitive advantage in which firms compete (Sadri & Lees, 2001). Culture is a success factor for business competition. Firms need to be aware that they have a right culture for right people and for right business missions and goals; otherwise, reversed effects firms will face.

Definitions of culture vary from one researcher to another but the concepts can be presumed as similar understandings. Many authors have shared ideas of what corporate culture is (e.g. Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Schein, 1992, Bliss, 1999, etc). The definition of corporate culture, inferred from the authors, is the system of norms, habits, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and assumptions which are shared among each other collectively and developed in one specific organization.

Culture is variance which can be changed from one location to another. One effectively applicable culture for one business unit may not be the case for others. This is always true when we look at broad picture in national culture concept. Variation can be small or big depending on differences between nations in terms of beliefs, norm, behavior, attitudes, and so forth. Corporate culture change might be necessary when firms need have for new business mission or goals. Many researches have been conducted related to culture issues. For example, Chow, Haddad, and Wu (2003) found the relationship between performance and culture. Even though the study cannot be fully relied on but is partially part of empirical evidences to prove the relationship. So, it is likely to have a premature conclusion that right culture brings about growth and wrong culture is slack to organizational development. Firms also need to consider whether they should adopt culture proactive or reactive.

Being culture proactive or aggressive, firms are pacesetters rather than (quoted from Chow, Haddad, and Wu, 2003, p. 67). Proactive firms forecast for future conditions. Preparation is arranged for any changes. It’s possible to say that being a proactive is better than reactive. Reactive firms, on the other hand, are not responsive to future’s new changes. They just wait to respond to things but not are pioneers of doing things.

Most of time, they find difficulties to adapt to changes or sudden moves of business trend; some may fail to adjust and are forced to shut down businesses. Firms with reactive adaptation seem not to be good and responsive players in market places. Proactive firms are in the contrary. They have predicted future scenarios, good and bad. Preparations are made based on foreseeable conditions. Any variation may not push firms into great loss or totally unresponsive.

Most of cases, cultural proactive firms are successful players and win most of games in marketplaces. It is mostly said that business growth possibility of proactive cultural firms is higher than reactive counterparts. According to that, this study adopted some items related to the concept of proactive or aggressive culture, like timely decision making, innovating decision making, etc (All dimensions of aggressive culture in this study were quoted from the work of Chow, Haddad, and Wu (2003, p. 67).