International Business Environment
Corporate Culture: definition
According to Case (1996), corporate culture refers to “the value and attitude that permeates a business.” It identifies what a company regards as important and what it regards as unimportant. McCune pointed out that “an organization's corporate culture encompasses its values, and therefore directs employees in how to act and get things done” (McCune, 1999, p.52). Almost every business has its own culture. If business strategies point out the direction for companies to work toward, culture decides how to go there.
Corporate culture can be considered to “take systematic efforts to establish a certain world view, a particular set of values and/or emotions among employees” (Alvesson, 2004, p.322). Some organizations have clear, distinctive cultures which make themselves stick out from competitors. They have strong effects on how company’s people work together. Corporate culture is a unique competitive advantage by spreading company’s core value to its customers and employees (Case, 1996). As Case’s argument, a successful culture gains “its power from specific practices that employees understand as symbolizing and representing the culture” (Case, 1996, p. 42). Corporate culture is a company’s identity which is really hard to copy.
National Culture: definition
Even though a particular company has its unique corporate culture, national culture differences may influence them in many different ways. One of them is how they are presented in different environments. Mental programming is regarded as “the pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Hofstede, 1991, p.4), which every person has acquired in childhood and carries along throughout life (Hofstede, 1991). A majority of inhabitants from one nation usually carry common mental programming, which provide national identity.
According to Hofstede (2001) culture on a national level is unique due to the completeness of a...
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