Note on Business and Culture

1. Day-3- Strategy, Business,
Alignment and Interface
Dr. Anitha Thomas

2. How is business related to culture?
• The culture of each country has its own beliefs, values and activities.
... Culture is a key component in business and has an impact on the
strategic direction of business. Culture influences management,
decisions and all business functions from accounting to production.
• Corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine
how a company's employees and management interact and handle
outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is implied, not
expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the
cumulative traits of the people the company hires.
• These are heavily dependent on how is Strategies being built

3. Global Strategies and Culture
• Each business strategy is built
considering global acceptance.
• It includes- Cost, National
Incentives, handling trade barriers,
getting asses to global market,
obtaining scale of economics
without any manipulation.
• These Strategy in a wide way
exhibits what cultural values the
organization has.
• More the values, better is the
Acceptance.
• Thus culture functions as an
operating system for any
organization.

4. • Companies like TATA, Mahindra
and Mahindra has been known
globally as a company of high
Values.
• The Index score of them is very
high.

5. How is Culture Read- Three Levels

7. A Study- core values and culture directly
correlate with business performance
• A study conducted by the Strategy Institute For Thought Leadership produced findings that
suggests core values and culture directly correlate with business performance. Indexed survey
data from this study related to core value perceptions and employee satisfaction can be viewed
relative to business financial performance – all indexed in relative terms on a scale of one to ten
for five different companies.
•
Aiming for performance excellence :
• Culture does affect performance, therefore the goal of tampering with culture in the first place is
to influence the organizational ethos towards one of performance and excellence. Most
executives would submit that we want the associates in our business, among other things, to be:
• highly ethical
• focused on creating value for our customers,
• conscientious about avoiding waste,
• dedicated to providing fanatical customer service,
• involved, responsible and giving citizens in the communities where they live.

8. Culture performs at least four functions:
(i) Culture distinguishes between one organisation and another.
(ii) It conveys a sense of identity for organisation members.
(iii) It helps in creating a sense of commitment to do something nobler
than one’s own interest.
It enhances social system stability.

9. The Interface- Business and Culture
• Culture Creates People
It is the culture which generally determines the ethos of people. It
tends to train people along particular lines which put a personality
stamp on them like Indians, Americans, Britishers, and Japanese etc.
There are sub cultures within a culture.
When people with different cultural backgrounds promote, own and
manage organisations then the organisations themselves tend to
acquire distinct cultures like culture of ‘Tata’ group of companies is
different from that of ‘Birlas’.

10. 2- Culture and Globalisatiion
• As one moves from one country to another there comes an element
of ‘Cultural shock’ i.e. confusion, disorientation and emotional
upheaval e.g. an executive transferred from India to Japan will require
lot of adjustment to make.
• So to overcome ‘Cultural shock’ there is need for understanding and
appreciating cultural differences across the countries.

11. 3- Attitude to Business
• Businessmen must have some basic set of philosophies to guide their
actions.
• Beliefs value systems, concerning what is right and what is wrong, are
basic to business activity.
• Attitude of people towards business is largely determined by their
culture.

12. 4, 5, 6 of interface
4. Attitude of People
Now a worker looks at his work depends on his culture. Motivation, morale and other
related aspects of human resource management are based on worker’s attitude to work.
Japanese have achieved progress because of their commitment to work.
5. Culture Determines Goods & Services
The type of clothes people wear, the food they eat, the building material they use to
construct houses vary from culture to culture and time to time within same culture.
Business should realise these cultural differences and bring out products accordingly.
6. Ambitions:
An ambitious person is highly motivated, has a strong urge to excel and is prepared to
change the organisation. Economy also becomes vibrant if a major portion of population is
of ambitious persons.

13. 7- Education
• In traditional society, education was a preserve of Brahmins. Things
have changed over the passage of time. Education institutions have
come up now in all corners of the country and now we have more
number of primary schools than U. S. S. R and U. S. A. put together.
Education benefits business. Business in turn has responded and
started supporting education. This support is manifested in starting
and maintaining educational institutions, sponsoring employees f

14. 8- Ethics in Business *
• Ethics is important because
(i) It corresponds to basic human needs
(ii) Values create credibility with the public.
(iii) Values give management credibility with employees.
(iv) Values help better decision making.
(v) Ethics and profit go together.

15. 9- Time Dimension
• It refers to people’s orientation—past, present and future. Time
dimension is another aspect of culture that influences business.
• Societies which are oriented towards past tend to preserve past
heritage. Our society is a good example of past and future
orientation.

16. Religion and Business
• Religion plays an important role in one’s life. It disciplines an individual to
lead an orderly life. The major religion across the world is Hinduism,
Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.
• Every person has religious feelings and beliefs. Every religion is subject to
further stratification, like in our society it has been stratified into four
major castes and those are Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Sudras.
Religion influences business to a great extent.
• In business boss-subordinate relationship, attitudes of people towards
business and many other issues depend upon religious beliefs.
• There are some religions which prohibit consumption of alcohol and non-
vegetarian food. That is one of reasons Birlas being Jains have not entered
into hoteliering, catering and leather industries.

17. Cultural Resources
• Cultural resources means heritage and our country is rich in cultural
heritage. South East Asia and Central Asia received culture from India
along with other things like rice, cotton, sugarcane, spices and even
game of chess (Shatranj).
• Even decimal system is the invention of Indian mathematician.
• Sanskrit literature is one of the greatest contributions India has made
to the culture of mankind.

18. Adapting Cross Cultural Business
Cultural Adaption
Is a process to accept
different Cultures.
While doing business- this
process requires major
attention.
Faster the Adaption, faster
will be the rooting of business
in that country.