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What Defines a Company's Culture?

Updated: Feb 3, 2023

by Maya Fetterman

Company cultures are about doing your job as a person in your workplace. It combines all your formal and informal systems, systems and behaviour and values that make your employees and their clients experience the same way. Company culture reflects the way things happen in the workplace.

Assessing a company's culture is important

The researchers identified four forms of cultural clan culture. The Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), created by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, enables companies to assess their corporate culture and utilise this in decision making within an organization to have a direct impact on work environment, employee happiness and employee retention. They categorised a company's culture into 4 groups:

Clan Culture

Clan cultures value teamwork and team building. This culture enables an inclusive culture with collective behaviors which are people focused. Employees within an organization with this culture value one another. This can be a healthy company culture, as long as it is not taken to extremes and productivity and success are still valued highly.

Adhocracy Culture

This is a great company culture for startups, where the company's mission is to grow quickly and produce results. This culture enables employees to take risks and work hard towards the company's success, fostering creativity. Employees understand the competitive edge and have a genuine desire to produce business results. This company culture requires the best leaders and performance management to enable a healthy culture alongside success.

Market Culture

Market culture is important in an organization where results are valued highly. This is a good company culture within the corporate world and allows the company to attract highly skilled prospective employees.

Hierarchy Culture

A hierarchy culture is a more structured work environment with traditional hierarchies within an organization. Decision making and company policies are the responsibility of the top leadership team, and this is the main influence on company culture.

The link between culture and outcomes

The evidence of our research is that when considering the impacts on the outcome from cultures, the context of operations and the culture also matter. The contexts, condition and culture. It is possible that what worked before will not work in the foreseeable future; what worked for one organization may not work for another. Our conclusion is as follows.

Why is strong company culture important?

Strong company culture makes working fun. It enables the company values to be moral and integral, which aligns with the personal values of employees, leading to employee retention.

Employee engagement

Engagement is when a company feels committed to doing the work. Strong business cultures encourage employees to be involved by creating and supporting communities of people who share the same goals. People engaged in work also have better relationships with each other and a better way to solve a problem effectively.

Productivity

Employees will work better as they become valued members of the group. An effective cultural framework creates diversity at work; employees feel they are contributing. Creating value is essential for improving productivity and resulting in consistent results.

Talent retention

Workers who love the company's culture can stay in the company longer. It may even boost companies' reputations as they are known for being an environment where employees want to stay and grow.