CORPORATE CULTURE AND STRUCTURAL ALIGNMENT

A Firm's Corporate Culture and Structural Alignment Govern the Underlying Strategies That Are Employed by the Enterprise. To What Extent Do You Agree With This Statement?

A Firm's Corporate Culture and Structural Alignment Govern the Underlying Strategies That Are Employed by the Enterprise.

Introduction

Hewlett Packard is one of a handful of companies that tries to implement all three of the corporate culture theories: the strong-cultures model, the strategic appropriate cultures model, and the adaptation model, into its overall corporate culture. The HP Way consisted of their style of running business operations, while maintaining their strong values. Fortunately both Hewlett and Packard had similar values to begin with. They were also aided in this by hiring like-minded individuals as well as having initial success.

I believe that a firm's corporate culture and structural alignment govern the underlying strategies that are employed by the enterprise. It is the fact that every organization is composed of its own unique set of organizational objectives, structures, corporate cultures, business infrastructure, markets, operational strategies and processes. While each of these factors is an equally viable part of an organization's overall corporate structure, the context of the organization's operations largely determine the nature of its corporate culture.

But by far the single most influential component if any organization is its culture (Barney, 1991). An organization's culture is what anchors its ideals and visions to those core values that drive the organization and its actions.

Discussion

The main value of the “HP Way” stressed serving all stakeholders of the company, and doing so in an ethical manner. The firm shared its success with its employees by offering them performance-based compensations, providing them opportunities to improve their skills, and by treating them with appreciation and respect. HP also gave back to its customers by doing everything they could to increase value to the end-user. Beyond attempting to provide higher quality products at better value than their competitors, they would also listen to customer's requests, and try to work with their customers to solve problems and continue to provide utility. Furthermore, HP would try to please its shareholders by maximizing its share price and by only getting into markets where they could generate profits.

Barney (1991) mentions contingency and configuration theorists have asserted a connection between organizational alignments and performance for many years. In their study, Lawrence and experts reported their now familiar result that successful firms in uncertain environments adopted more differentiated structures than unsuccessful firms, and they employed sophisticated integration mechanisms (such as task forces and liaison devices) that were appropriate to this greater degree of differentiation (Barney, 1991), whereas successful firms in less uncertain environments adopted lesser differentiation and used less sophisticated integration mechanisms. The authors concluded that internal attributes of the organization, in terms of structure and orientation, can be tested for goodness of fit with the various environmental variables and the predispositions of members. Unit performance thus emerges as a function of this fit.

The organizational factors of alignment and culture interact to produce an increasingly integrated ...