PSY345X Organizational Psychology

Prepare a paper describing how corporate culture plays a role in the organization's approach to customer relations and social responsibility.

Corporate culture is the beliefs and the behaviours that decides how an organization’s management and the employees interact and handle the business transactions (Hickman & Silva, 2018). The culture of the organization refers to the business hours, dress code, turnover, hiring decisions, client satisfaction, benefits that the employee gets, office setup etc. These are some of the factors that influences the working environment of the organization. The corporate or organizational culture has a direct impact on the growth of the organization.

Corporate culture are generally of 5 types and those are:

• Team-first Corporate Culture: Team oriented style companies focus on building a corporate environment that is employee friendly (Pan, Siegel & Wang, 2017). They believe that happier employees will provide better customer satisfaction. Making their employees happy is their top priority. One such company is Zappos who are famous for their fun culture and this leads to the brilliant customer satisfaction. This team culture helps the employees to freely interact with the management and this resolves many problems in the organization.
• Elite corporate culture: These team culture are used by those who wants to innovate and bring change in the market. An elite organizational culture hires the best employee. Companies with the elite culture hires the employees who are capable, confident, and competitive. One of the best example of the organization who uses this wok culture is the SpaceX (Hernandez, 2013). The employees within this work culture aren’t afraid of questioning the things which can be improved, the top most priority for them is their work and they generally have a long working hours. They has highly skilled employees who are looking to innovate all the time (Benn, Edwards & Williams, 2014).
• Horizontal corporate culture: This type of work culture is common with the start-up business because it is a more collaborative work culture. In this work culture, everyone tries to pitch in his or her thoughts and mind-set. Basecamp is the suitable example of this workplace culture. All the employee tend to participate in this type of work environment. The organization continuously improves their product in the market so that they can be ahead of their rivals (Carlos Pinho, Paula Rodrigues & Dibb, 2014).
• Conventional corporate culture: These are the traditional method of managing the corporate culture. In this corporate culture, the organization has some strict guidelines for most of the departments and individuals. The interaction between the departments are very less. The CEO decides most of the decisions that are taken in the company.
• Progressive corporate culture: The progressive working culture is the one in which the employees talks openly about the competition and the possible solution to handle the competition. The organization who uses the progressive work culture has a high turnover rate. Any change in the market has a direct impact on the revenue of the company. One of the example of this corporate culture that can be seen in LinkedIn (Kim, Kim & Nam, 2014).

Corporate culture has a direct impact on the customer relations and social responsibility. A good corporate culture has a positive impact on the production and growth of the organization. Corporate culture ensures that the conflicts and arguments within the workplace decreases with the help of some guidelines that is set by the organization. A good corporate culture has the following effects on the organization:

• Satisfied customers: Business organization that have treated their employee properly and provided a friendly work environment has proved to deliver good customer service. The profit driven company who have only focused on increasing the profit have suffered loss in the long-run. A company that values its customer will give employees who value their customer (Keintany & Riwo-Abudho, 2014).
• Accurate performance appraisal: when the employees of the organization are appraised upon the customer service or satisfaction as par6t of the performance assessment will work to provide better and excellent customer service. They will find out new ways to make sure that the customers are satisfied in every way possible and they will take responsibilities to resolve all the issues. Using the strategy of measuring the customer satisfaction to identify the job success is the most effective way to guarantee a great customer service (Dusterhoff, Cunningham & MacGregor, 2014).
• Competitive culture reduces the production: when a work environment is marked with fierce competition between the employees and the co-workers, it hampers the teamwork and that reduces the company’s ability to deliver high customer experience. Friendly competition is healthy for the organization but when the competition becomes fierce, it damages the customer satisfaction (Yesil & Kaya, 2013).
• Employee takes responsibilities: A good corporate culture their employees responsible and they tend to take responsibilities seriously. Handling the responsibility will solve many issues in the organization and the management will be stress free. A work culture where the employees are trusted and are empowered to take decisions regarding any operational decisions, reap positive results. This also increases the production of the organization and increases the flexibility of the management.(Griffin, Bryant & Koerber, 2015).

A good work culture has number of benefits that the organization can get in increasing the customer satisfaction. A good work culture will reduce the tension in the work environment and will create a good bonding between the employees. Employee satisfaction will help the company to satisfy their customer. Satisfying the customer will ensure that their revenue increases and this will also help them in increasing their customer’s base.  

Negative corporate culture effects:

Negative corporate culture has a number of impacts on the ethical behaviour and these are:

• Poor discipline: A negative corporate culture e leads to unethical behaviour in the workplace. If the organization does not punish the unethical employees in the organization then it will destroy the whole workplace. This will affect the production, which will ultimately affect in meeting the deadline.
• Hypercompetitive co-workers: If a company rewards their employee based on team performance rather than personal achievement, employees will then focus on the ethical boundaries of the company. For example, if the manager gets rewards for the team achievement without the employee getting any rewards then the employee will use the unethical way to move ahead.

References:

Benn, S., Edwards, M., & Williams, T. (2014). Organizational change for corporate sustainability. Routledge.

Carlos Pinho, J., Paula Rodrigues, A., & Dibb, S. (2014). The role of corporate culture, market orientation and organisational commitment in organisational performance: the case of non-profit organisations. Journal of Management Development, 33(4), 374-398.

Dusterhoff, C., Cunningham, J. B., & MacGregor, J. N. (2014). The effects of performance rating, leader–member exchange, perceived utility, and organizational justice on performance appraisal satisfaction: Applying a moral judgment perspective. Journal of business ethics, 119(2), 265-273.

Griffin, J. J., Bryant, A., & Koerber, C. P. (2015). Corporate responsibility and employee relations: From external pressure to action. Group & Organization Management, 40(3), 378-404.

Hernandez, N. (2013). SpaceX—Space Exploration Technologies Corporations. The Little Book of Big Companies, 107.

Hickman, C. R., & Silva, M. A. (2018). Creating excellence: Managing corporate culture, strategy, and change in the new age. Routledge.

Keitany, P., & Riwo-Abudho, M. (2014). Effects of lean production on organizational performance: a case study of flour producing company in Kenya. Eur J Logistics Purchasing Supply Chain Mgmt, 2(2), 1-14.

Kim, D., Kim, J. H., & Nam, Y. (2014). How does industry use social networking sites? An analysis of corporate dialogic uses of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn by industry type. Quality & Quantity, 48(5), 2605-2614.

Pan, Y., Siegel, S., & Wang, T. Y. (2017). Corporate risk culture. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 52(6), 2327-2367.

Yesil, S., & Kaya, A. (2013). The effect of organizational culture on firm financial performance: Evidence from a developing country. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 81, 428-437