After reading this article you will learn about the relation between performance and organisation climate.
Organisation culture has the potential to enhance organisational effectiveness, individual satisfaction and certainty about how various problems will be handled. However, if the culture gets out of step with the changing expectations of the internal and external stakeholders, organisational effectiveness can be hindered.
Generally, organisation culture and its performance are directly related. Thus, any attempt to change the culture is to create a more effective organisation. It is observed that strong and well-developed culture is an important characteristic of organisations that have outstanding performance records.
Strong culture implies that most managers and employees share a set of consistent values and methods of doing business:
1. A strong organisation culture facilitates goal alignment. As all employees share the same basic assumptions, they agree not just on what goals to pursue but also on the means by which they should be achieved. As a result, employee initiative, energy and enthusiasm all move in the same direction. In these organisations, there are few problems of coordination and control, communication is quick and effective and resources are not wasted in internal conflicts. All this means organisational performance is likely to be healthy.
2. A strong culture leads to high level of motivation. There are two main arguments here. First, it has been suggested that there is something intrinsically appealing about the strong cultures that encourage people to identify themselves with the organisation. Second, it is sometimes thought that strong culture organisations incorporate practices which make working for them rewarding. These practices tend to include employee participation in decision-making and various recognition schemes.
3. A strong culture is better able to learn from its past as strong cultures possess agreed norms of behaviour, integrative rituals, ceremonies and well-known stories. These reinforce consensus on the interpretation of issues and events based on past experience, provide precedents from the organisation’s history and help to decide how to meet new challenges and promote self-understanding and social cohesion.