Question

Can culture be a liability for an organization? Explain and provide examples.

Answer 1

Yes, organizational culture can become a liability for it in the cases something happens which the environment cannot conform to. It can also be a liability in the case an external environment needs to be applied to its own in the case of a merger or an acquisition.

The rituals, infrastructure, practices, working habits, dynamics of the relationship between the employers and the management and its espoused values all contribute to this factor. What a company believes and how a company functions are interrelated in the sense that the internal environment needs to take into account the external environment to be able to successfully function with the competition.

Culture plays a huge role in the company’s function, for example, culture such as fragmentation culture and mercenary culture, sets its own challenges in terms of interaction that the employees have to each other and the alignment of their goals and values. When a company or any organization has workers that do not mix well with each other, this causes the organization a dent in their work output and essentially, in the long run, can cause a negative impact in the company as the structural level something from which the company might not be able to come back from.