· Define culture. How can culture be conceptualized? Examine Geert Hofstede\'s w
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Question
· Define culture. How can culture be conceptualized? Examine Geert Hofstede's work and contrast it with the Project GLOBE study. What are your observations?
· How do US-based companies struggle with diversity and cultural issues?
· Research and identify an organization that handles diversity in a "best practice" manner. Discuss how the organization addresses issues.
· Thinking about your own organization, how would cultural dimensions influence your work with customers or clients?
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“Please write not less than 500 words “
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Explanation / Answer
Culture in any organization is a set of values and beliefs that determines how people in that organization behave, dress up, interact with their colleagues and perform their jobs.
Although it's unclear as to how exactly one should conceptualize culture, but here I can describe one of the better ways that I have found :-
Culture consists of varying degree of values, beliefs, cognition, discourse etc. As such culture can be divided into three possibilites:
1) Culture as a component of social system - Here culture works as a component that interacts with other components of organization like psychological, political, economic etc. and subordinates them to make them more meaningful. The culture developed helps in decision making in these other components.
2) Cuture as a symbol - Culture, in this case, can be considered as something that reflects values and belief system of any organization. Culture here plays much more of an environmental role.
3) Culture as a process - Culture, here, works as if the boundaries beween its symbolic and sociological ways have shrinked and merged into one. Such a thing then helps in various processes and activities taken by the organization.
US companies struggle with diversity and cultural issues mainly because of the varied type of employees they generally get. Each and every employee, in such a scenario, brings with himself a certain set of values and beliefs. The companies job then is to mould these values and beliefs in a way that they are in alignment with the organizational culture. Now imagine this happening with almost every employee as the employees are from different countries, state, culture etc, and it becomes a really big problem. This is the reason US companies have to really struggle to accomodate everyone.
'Johnson and Johnson' is one of the best organizations in terms of diversity handling. It is known to accomodate everyone, and not just on the basis of gender and race, but also on the basis of religion, ethnicity etc. too. They make it happen through 'Employees Resource Programmes', 'Mentoring Programmes' and 'Diversity University'. Infact they have received a lot of awards and accolades for the same.
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