Organization’s High Performance Culture

Organization’s High Performance Culture

The article “High Performance Culture” is about how to develop a high performance culture. Every organization has their own culture which determines how people behaves and “how things are done around here”, (Drennan 1992) culture represents the organization’s norms, beliefs and values, etc. In the organization, everyone shares same values, beliefs and norms, and everyone’s behavior is guided by the culture. However, organizations do not just need good culture, they need high performance culture. High performance culture would provide organizations the greatest source of competitive advantage. The author believes “ high performance culture implies that the employees of the organization make extra effort to be productive, accept change, do not neglect details, do their best, are willing to try something new, develop their talents/ abilities, are proud of their abilities, enjoy their jobs, seek constant improvement and display confidence in management.” (Joshi, 2001)

People may wonder how to develop the high performance culture. The author believes if one organization’s beliefs, values and norms are developed, it has high performance culture.  However, beliefs, values and norms are not developed overnight, but need a period of time and lots of actions. Such as exploring the problems and needs of the organization first; then restructure the organization “to reduce hierarchy, reduce the emphasis on functional autonomy and have smaller units”; (Joshi, 2001) and developing a better and effective team to achieve higher productivity; also the restructured organization need to develop an open, honest and relevant communication environment which helps the organization to build trust among its members; also the restructured organization needs the fully support from the top management, such as training or human resource systems; and the most importantly, a new style of management would bring the restructured organization best strategies and more innovations. 

From the textbook, “learning and sharing are two essential processes of culture”, people in an organization will not stop learning and sharing the organization’s beliefs, values and norms. Culture is important to every single organization, with a good culture, organization will perform well. Meanwhile, it is important to develop a high performance culture which would encourage productive work behavior and higher job satisfaction.

Citied

Rama J. Joshi, “High Performance Culture”, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations , Vol. 37, No. 1, Developing a Culture of High Performance (Jul., 2001), pp. 18-30, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27767758

Drennon, D. (1992), Transforming Company Culture, McGraw Hill, London.