Welcome to the Organisational Culture Click & Learn App!

Strategy is comprised of everything that will give guidance to management in order to realise what it wants, such as mission, vision, core values, purpose and objectives.

The context in which an organisation operates will limit the options management has to come up with their optimal culture of choice. Thus, if central government has imposed many of laws and directives on a particular sector, for example in the case of pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical companies cannot score higher on Dimension D2: Internally versus Externally driven than between 50 to 60. The exception is when management of such companies are up for a confrontation with central government or they are able to bend the rules.

Unless stated otherwise, we mean organisational culture when using the word culture. Next to organisational culture you can distinguish many other types of cultures, such as national cultures, regional cultures and professional cultures.

We make a distinction between actual culture, i.e. the culture as it is now, and optimal culture, i.e. the culture, which, if put in place, will enable the realisation of your objectives in the best possible way.

Organisational culture is defined by Geert Hofstede as the way people in an organisation relate to each other, to their work and to the outside world compared to how it is done in other organisations.

Work should not be taken too literally. It comprises all kind of activities for which people come together at a regular basis to make things happen together, such as learning at school, singing in a choir and participating in a religion.

Core values are widely used nowadays, but it is questionable whether the introduction of core values will create any actual added value. This question can be raised for the following reasons:

1. Core values often contain more ideology, i.e. concepts which sound nice, than substance.
2. After having conducted culture scans in companies which had proclaimed their core values a couple of years prior to our scans, we never found the full set of core values embedded in their culture. We even found that rarely had just one of those core values been incorporated in their culture.
3. Sets of core values do not differentiate one company from another. Each organisation, however, is unique. Thus, core values are either about ideology or they cover generic management principles, such as “customer care.” But, in the latter case, why would management want to declare something which is common sense?

Based on our findings, core values seem to be especially useful if it is the intention of top management to appease stakeholders and win them over to their side. The question is whether or not you can always appease everybody simultaneously. Note that we have not used the word “fool,” instead of “appease,” in order to not upset you.

• 6-D Model©: Charts national cultures.
• Six Culture Clusters©: Identifies impact on successful management.
• Levers for Change©: Provides concrete suggestions for indirect organisational change to help you move from your current culture to your optimal culture so as to increase global effectiveness.
• Executive Match 360©: Assesses the management team of your organisation to make sure the culture of the management team supports your strategy, utilises direct change.
• Cultural Survey©: Gives individual feedback regarding a country of interest.

On one hand, many top managers are aware of the importance of the concept of culture in staying or in becoming successful. If asked why then they so rarely use it as an additional tool of management, many answered that the concept is too fluffy. On the other hand, many among them look for simple solutions.

This model has been developed during the mid-eighties by Professor Geert Hofstede and colleagues.