CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Although the concept of organizational culture was
popularized in the early 1980s, its roots can be traced back to the early human
relations view of organizations that originated in the 1940s. Human relations
theories viewed the informal, nonmaterial, interpersonal, and moral bases of
cooperation and commitment as perhaps more important than the formal, material
and instrumental controls stressed by the rational system theorists. The human
relations perspective drew its inspiration from even earlier anthropological
and sociological work on culture associated with groups and societies
(Geerts,2000; Mead, 1998; Durkheim, 2000; Weber, 2007, 2008).
Attention to organizational culture lost ground as
organizational science, and social science in general became increasingly
quantitative. To the extent that research on organizational culture survived,
its focus shifted to its more measurable aspects, particularly employee
attitudes and perceptions and/or observable organizational conditions thought
to correspond to employee perceptions (i.e. the level of individual
involvement, the degree of delegation, the extent of social distance as implied
by status differences, and the amount of coordination across units). This
research, referred to as organizational climate studies, was prominent during
the 1960s and 1970s (Denison, 2000).
This renewed interest in organizational culture
represented a return to the early organizational literature but it went far
beyond this literature in contributing important new insights and ways of
thinking about the role, importance and characteristics of organizational
culture. Also, researchon the effect of culture on organizational
performance and investigations into how organizational culture are created,
maintained, and changed received greater attention. The main difference was
that organizational culture was now viewed less as a natural, organically
emergent phenomenon and more as a manipulable and manageable competitive asset.
Manufacturing started in Nigeria in 1946.
Consequent to the aforesaid, Nigerian Breweries Plc, the Pioneer and largest
brewing company in Nigeria, was incorporated in 1946 and recorded a
landmark when the first bottle of Star
Larger Beer rolled off the bottling lines in its Lagos brewery in June 1949.
This was followed by Aba brewery which was commissioned in 1957, Kaduna brewery
in 1963 and Ibadan brewery in 1982. In September 1993, the company acquired its
fifth brewery in Enugu while in October 2003, a sixth brewery, sited at Ama
Green field in Enugu State was commissioned. Ama brewery is the biggest brewery
in Nigeria and the most modern in the world. Thus, from its humble beginning in
1946, the company now has five operational breweries from which its high
quality products are distributed to all parts of this country.
An organization’s current customs, traditions and
general way of doing things are largely due to what it has done before and the
degree of success it has had with those endeavours, (Kanter,1980). The founders
of an organization traditionally have a major impact on that organization’s
early culture. They have a vision of what the organization should be. They are
unconstrained by previous customs or ideologies. The small size that typically
characterizes new organizations further facilitates the founders’ imposition of
their vision on all organizational members. Culture creation occurs in three
ways. First, founders hire and keep only employees who think and feel the same
way they do. Second, they indoctrinate and socialize these employees to their way of thinking and feeling. And
finally, the founders’ own behaviour acts as a role model that encourages
employees to identify with them and thereby internalize their beliefs, values
and assumptions. When the organization succeeds, the founders’ vision becomes
seen as a primary determinant of that success. At this point, the founder’s
entire personality becomes embedded in the culture of the organization.
The culture at Hyundai, the giant Korean
conglomerate, is largely a reflection of its founder Chung Ju Tung. Hyundia’s
fiercely competitive style and its disciplined, authoritarian nature are the
same characteristics often used to describe Chung. Other contemporary examples
of founders who have had an immeasurable impact on their organization’s culture
would include Bill Gates at Microsoft, Ingvar Kampard at the furniture retailer
IKEA, Gerry Harvey of Harvey Norman retail stores and Richard Branson at the
Virgin group.
Kilmann (2000) opines that culture in the
organizational context can be described as the collective behaviour or styles
of people, their attitude towards various constituents of business such as
customers, co-workers, share-holders and so on and so forth and the common
values that they share among themselves, which in fact acts like a binding
force between them. One is actually observing the culture of an organization,
when he or she is using words such as handworking, friendly, professional,
ethical etc to describe the general behaviour of the people. The culture
decisively influences the priorities set by the organization, as it is the underlying
value system in the organization that emphasizes things like customer focus,
innovation, cost reduction, strong alliances, empowerment and control in
response to the various business stimuli.
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