Corporate Culture And Competitive Advantage

DISCIPLINE OF RESEARCH:

Management Sciences

TITLE OF RESEARCH:

Increasing the organisations competitive advantage through its corporate culture: A case of Altech UEC, Durban

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Corporate Culture is an important aspect in understanding a company, because for any organization to function effectively it must for some degree have a general idea on how culture will impact its ability to gain competitive advantage. Many companies within different industries have always observed that having an effective corporate culture can have a major influence on the performance of the business. This is the motive why many managers try to embrace an efficient corporate culture approach. Corporate Culture environment is one of the

This is the reason why many companies try to adopt efficient organisational culture approach. In order to find out if this observation is true, there is a necessity to investigate organisational culture. The drive is to give a more detailed understanding about organisational culture and its influence on competitive advantage.

According to Worley and Cummings (2001), organizational culture encompasses the sharing of knowledge. Sharing of opinions and experiences with others suggests that organisational culture stimulates a certain degree of stability among the employees of the company. Corporate culture basically includes the beliefs, ideas and values on what the company is all about, how its employees should conduct themselves and in what manner it expresses itself in relation to its external environment. A culture is reflected in a company’s philosophies, rules, values, norms, climate, symbols, and almost everything its member does (Oden,

• To establish the relationship between leadership along with strategy and organisational culture.

• To analyse the role of corporate culture in the organization gaining competitive advantage.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

• What is the relationship between organizational culture and competitive advantage?

• How will culture impact productivity and ability to gain competitive advantage?

• What is the influence of leadership and strategy on corporate culture?

• Why is corporate culture so important in strategy?

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theoretical model showed in the study views organizations as sets of critical resources that empower firms to compete (Barney, 1991). In this framework, performance variances across companies can be attributed to variations in their capabilities, skills and resources, the latter of which importantly includes organizational culture. If an organization’s resources are rare, valuable, difficult to replicate and non-substitutable, they provide the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. Competitive advantage, will in turn, promote efficiency and generate above average rates of return for the