Organizational Culture

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the term globalization has covered a wide range of aspects, such as political, economical and cultural. This term has completely changed the world and has become an important aspect to consider for an individual, an organization or a country. Within the past years “Globalization” has been used more and more frequently by organizations and their managers, and even the smallest companies are required to be more globally efficient to be more competitive.

At the beginning the increasing speed of all these changes forced the organizations to concentrate on providing management models that focused merely on the technical and economical management of the resources. This helped the organizations to adapt slowly to the recent changes and transformations they were facing, however when all these technical and economical changes were strengthened the companies started to focus in other important aspects that would make them differentiate and help them become successful in a long term. It was at this point that the importance of human resources, motivational studies, incentives and team work relationships inside of organizations was clearly seen.

At the same time it was also proven that the organization functions as a psychosocial system in which the employees react productively according to the work environment in which they are working. This led to the conclusion that the employee-employer relationship was influenced by the perception that organizations are complex social systems.

From this perspective, more specific factors were identified, aspects such as values, beliefs, leadership which formed a particular culture that influenced the internal behavior of the members and at the same time influenced the external adaptation of the company and its market. This is how the term “Organizational Culture” came to be considered a highly important tool for companies in the decade of the eighties.

Different theories emphasized the importance of “Organizational culture” and they raised the idea in which the normative system of the organization can be one of the most significant assets in the company or in the other way it can be the most destructive liability.

In relation with the previously explained concern about the present situation of the organizational culture in the Latin America and specifically in Mexican organizations was raised. Therefore the present work will study the current transnational situation and will compare the culture of this transnational with the Mexican culture.

2. PROBLEMATIC

Business organization is not only about planned structures and systems, but it’s also about cultural systems. In the heart of these cultural systems each member develops reciprocal links establishing normative codes, symbolic meanings, language forms/styles, etc.

This mechanism allows identifying the human being with their organization and facilitates the coordination of the functions of the countless employees. It is a cultural system that organizations form and extraordinary world approachable from a social science perspective.

Through the study of the culture it is possible to observe its influence over the functioning and operation of the organization, since the organizational processes are affected on their development by “particular ways of doing things”.

These “particular ways of doing things” as once was resumed the organizational culture term, has acquired such magnitude than many studies have emphasized the impact that they have in the success and permanence of the companies.

Therefore a strong and deep-rooted culture will assure a higher level of efficiency of its personal, and also it will allow an integration and adjustment between the organizational goals and the personal ambitions of the employees, establishing itself as a cohesiveness factor that shapes the identity of an organization in a corporative body.

As a result of the importance of cultural issues in the organization and to the slow development of this topic in Latin America, especially in Mexico, comes the interest of making a study in this field, and more specifically in the sociology of the organizations and the physiology of Mexican employees.

3. OBJECTIVE

The objective of this paper is to make a study and a comparison between the cultures of a transnational in Mexico against the organizational culture of local companies. One specific objective is to explore and describe the physiology of Mexican employees, and how this affects the culture and management of this transnational.

4. LITERATURE REVIEW

4.1. Culture

“Culture” comes from Latin “colere” which means to cultivate. In its most primitive connotation it referred to the process of cultivation as in agriculture. Afterward, Cicerone applied it to the “Cultivation of the spirit” emerging like that the humanistic and classic sense of the term. From this perspective, the meaning of “culture” denotes eruditeness and intellectual refinement.

In 1871 the English anthropologist E.Burnett Tylor gave a now classic definition that established the foundation of the modern conceptualizations: “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Paraphrasing B.Malinowski, Ronnie Lessem (1990) affirms that culture is an integral whole formed by instruments and consumption goods, constitutional statutes….ideas and occupation, beliefs and customs….a vast unit, in part material, in part human and in part spiritual, by which a man can face concrete and specific problems.

Refining the concept of culture, there is another concept which is more modern and precise, that emerges from the historic-critic study made by A.L. Kroeber y C. Kluckhohn (1952), whose work collects more than 164 definitions of culture.

Thus, the 164 definitions mentioned before, the authors added the following: “Culture consists in implicit and explicit models and patterns, of and from the behavior - acquired and transmitted through symbols - that compose the exclusive work from human groups, including material objects. The essential nucleus of the culture is composed by traditional ideas (transmitted and selected historically) and especially by values associated to them. The cultural system can be considered in one

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