Corporate culture
Introduction:
Corporate culture is one of the important conceptions in organizations in recent years. Every organization has its own unique culture or value t. Having a clear understanding of corporate culture and its classification would help us comprehending the organization in every aspect. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner’s [1]have defined four kinds of corporate cultures: the family, the Eiffel Tower, the guided missile and the incubator. We will certainly benefits from studying their classification of corporate cultures.
Key words:
Corporate culture, classification, overlap
What is corporate culture?
Many articles and books have been written in recent years about culture in organizations, u
sually referred to as "Corporate Culture."(企业文化) Here corporate culture refers to "the moral, social, and behavioral norms of an organization bad on the beliefs, attitudes, and priorities of its members."
Organization’s culture is not a list of values developed at an offsite by the executive team and framed on the wall in their lobbies. The are ideals. Every organization has its own unique culture or value t. Most organizations don't consciously try to create a certain culture. The culture of the organization is typically created unconsciously, bad on the values or of the top management or the founders of an organization. In reality, what management pays attention to and rewards is often the strongest indicator of the organization's culture. This is often quite different than the values it verbalizes or the ideals it strives for.
Culture drives the organization and its actions. It is somewhat like "the operating system" of the organization. It guides how employees think, act and feel. It is dynamic and fluid, and it is never static. A culture may be effective at one time, under a given t of circumst
ances and ineffective at another time. There is no generically good culture. There are however, generic patterns of health and pathology.
The classification of corporate culture
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner’s classification of the corporate culture is bad on two dimensions, universalism-particularism（普遍主义-特殊主义）and individualism-collectivism（个人主义-集体主义）, thus generating four quadrants. The dimensions they ud to distinguish different corporate cultures are equality-hierarchy（平等-等级） and orientation to the person-orientation to the task（以人为本-以工作为本）. The two dimensions enable them to define four types of corporate culture. The four types can be described as follows.
1, the family（家庭型）
2,the Eiffel Tower（埃菲尔铁塔型）
3, the guided missile（导弹型）
4, the incubator（孵化器型）
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner point out that the four types of corporate culture are “ideal types”. While in practice the types are mixed or overlaid with one another（相互混合交替）. It’s rather complicated than our imagination. And this classification is uful for exploring the basis of each type in terms of how employees learn, change, resolve conflicts, reward, motivate and so on. We do get benefits from studying their classification of corporate cultures.
The family culture家庭型文化
According to Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, the metaphor of family culture pos a kind of clo relationship within the whole organization. “It is personal and at the same time hierarchical（等级性质的）, in the n that the “father” of the family has experience and authority greatly exceeding tho of his “children”, especially where the are young. As a result, the leader in the organization is regarded as a caring father（慈爱的父亲） who knows better than his subordinates what should be done and
what is good for them. However, rather than being threatening, this type of power is esntially intimate and (hopefully) benign. The work of the corporation in this type of culture is usually carried forward in an atmosphere that in many respects mimics the home.” Father is always the reprentative of power and authority at home, especially in the Asian countries. However, he is also a caring father, who power and authority ems quite intimate and benign, not threatening at all. (Here the absolute authority pod by some arbitrary leaders is exclusive in this tting). To some extend, the subordinates are passively accepted the arrangement and order of the father, but this order could esntially bring benefits to them. And the benign atmosphere of a big family is quite humanistic.
The Eiffel Towel culture埃菲尔铁塔型文化
As we mentioned above, the nepotism（裙带关系） within an organization would be regard as corruption and a conflict of interest by some cultures for the reason that they emphasizes on the various roles and functions prescribed in advance. They’re role orient
ated. Everyone of the organization has been placed in a certain place, being responsible for the certain work prescribed by his or her supervisors. If every one of them dedicated to carry out their works successfully, the whole organization would be run smoothly forward. In other words, the whole organization asmbles a pyramid（金字塔）, forming a certain kind of hierarchy（等级）. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner have chon the Eiffel Towel in Paris to symbolize this culture type “becau it is steep, symmetrical, narrow at the top and broad at the ba, stable, rigid and robust.” It’s characteristic to some degree asmble that of the work hierarchy in role orientated corporate. And more importantly, “its structure, too, is more important than its function”. Therefore, the organization, including the supervisors and the subordinates, pay their attention to the structure of the organization rather than the functions. Function would be taken over by structure under certain circumstances.
