Question

During the semester, we talked a lot of impact of People, Process and Technology. All of the above come together to either help Enterprises thrive in business or vanish. One important point of intersection is the relationship between the Enterprise Structure and Culture. There is a general assumption that the Enterprise structure and Enterprise culture impact each other. In a domain of your choice, with examples, First, outline the mechanism through which Enterprise Culture impacts the design of Enterprise Structure, how the culture affects the long term maintenance, strengthening, or changing of enterprise structure. Second, based on the known classifications of Enterprise structure, please provide examples of kind of culture that would exist and mutual interdependence with structure. Pros and Cons of both scenarios.

Answer 1

Enterprise structure: Its a process of deciding how tasks will be divided, groupped and organised so to use less resouces within least possible time. Enterprise structure could be functional structure, matrix structure, divisional structure, etc. There are numerous structures because of different stratergies used, different technologies applied and based on global implications.

Enterprise culture: A set of condition or principles or values or norms by which a company lives a life and is valued for the same is enterprise culture. Principles like, innovation, taking risk, result and profit orientation. Enterprise culture will redifine the boundry, it will form new commitment.

To scale goals effectively companies will have a formal structure. It becomes very crucial to assign tasks into various groups so as to ensure that people are working on different task or assignment so as to get maximum return. As organizations run because of people, there tends to form a slight informal structures or climate or environments within the company which may leads to different behaviors or attitudes or traits or perceptions. Now when they are supposed to work together as a group on a project to reach their goal there is a way to talk and communicate, which will form the organizational culture, where knowingly or unknowingly got created by the employees. Over long term, this rapport will engage the employees to carry out the projects smoothly, if any person is dissatisfied and causes imbalence, then it will lower morale of the team and organisation. Thus preserving the enterprise culture is important for the enterprise structure. Organization culture in some way will defines the structure of organization but at the same instant the structure will also partially define the culture of an organization. This is the relationship between Enterprise structure and Enterprise culture. So there is interdependence on one another. This is how they will impact each other.

Types of enterprise culture that exist:
To work in a TEAM: employees are hired based on culture, secondary preference is given to skills and experience second. Here employees’ happiness is organisations top priority like team outings. Eg: NETFLIX. The advantage of this culture is getting new thoughts because of socialising and disadvantage will be wasting time and resources on outings.

Knowledge + Skill: Here only talented employees are hired because The organisation always wants to innovate something or lead the world by showing their product first to the world. Thus the employees merely shouldn’t be knowledgeable but daring as well, lead the way through innovation. Thus result is fast growth. Eg: Google. The advantage of this culture is sucess can be acheived easily and disadvantage will be not everyone gets an employee with such qualities, thus implementing it might be difficult.

Horizontal Expansion or Start-up Culture: Here everyone is equal. Everyone needs to collaborate and pitch in ideads. Thoughts should be concurrent. This culture offers more flexibility, based on market or consumer feedback changes can be made. The advantage of this culture is the whole staff can reach out to the decission making authority and pitch in ideas easily and disadvantage will be some people get emotional, thus not everyone should get involved in a important decision or policy making meeting. Only certain people should attend.