Organizational Behavior

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Organizational Behavior

Content:

Organizational categories discussed in the article can be used as a foundation when (re)structuring and identifying an organizational culture.

Organizational behavior:

“The way things are done here” This is the main principle of an organization’s culture, only this is very subjective and therefore hard to define or create an organization’s culture.

Even though a culture is highly subjective and influenced by many controllable and uncontrollable factors it has a deep impact on organizational behavior.

An organization’s culture is determined by many factors, the most important factors are; leadership, orientation / focus (detail, outcome, people or team), market, products and location.

B. Tharp writes about four organizational culture types these types can be used to identify the culture. The 2 dimension method focuses on internal versus external and flexibility versus stability.

I think this approach is very limited in its practical application; in general it is possible to allocate a culture depending on the company profile, market and leadership style. Nevertheless there are so many factors and internal differences which make it really hard to put a company in one of the four ‘boxes’.

A company’s culture is also highly dependent on the industry; working in a highly innovative industry means changes in the market and processes constantly. Employees will be confronted with changes all the time and must be able to adapt to these situations which demands completely different skills when working in a very stable market.

Trends and changes

In history a lot of trends can be discovered about cultural changes within large corporations.

Pioneers used different and new corpora...

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...this year.

Another example is that pilots help whenever needed on the ground, they will put the last bag in to the plane if necessary. A pilot could get hurt while doing this and is not busy preparing his flight which could lead to operational problems.

In the wrong case scenario this could affect South West operations and its performance.

South West has a performance focused culture which is based on customer satisfaction and operational performance. Employees get rewarded every three months which is a huge motivator in order to keep the service level and performance high.

Nevertheless South West doesn’t pay enough attention to risk management especially at operational level, accountabilities and responsibilities should be allocated to local management. This would make it easier to manage performance and to take adequate action in case performance is low.

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