Elements of Culture Corporate Artefacts

Introduction of Culture Corporate Artefacts

Experienced captains know that navigating uncharted sea requires their attention. All of which will allow them to observe, analyse/predict potential risks and make proper decisions. As a manager, running an existing or setting up a new company also need these skills. In short, strategic cultural management helps corporate to do a myriad of things. For instance, heighten focus, understand the marketing environment and re-position business to effectively compete. So it is with culture corporate artefacts.

Corporate strategy management is related to different aspects, such as financial aspects, human resources management, organisational culture, marketing, etc. Organisational culture is one of these important aspects, which is an indispensable and intangible aspect of strategy management. The concepts of organisational culture and organisational strategy looks like different, but they have a closer relationship between each other. Normally one part of corporate success depends on the support of organisational culture to organisational strategy.

Expectations of Culture Corporate Artefacts

Organisational culture is about expectations, values and beliefs learned and shared by the company’s members and transmitted from one generation of employees to anther. The organisational culture generally reflects the values of the founders and the mission of the company. Culture gives a corporate a sense of identity: “This is what we stand for. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

The culture includes the dominant orientation of the company, such as customer care at Hilton, innovation at Apple, product quality at Volvo, or R&D at HP. It often includes the many informal work rules that the staffs follow without asking questions. These work practices over time become part of a company’s unquestioned tradition. The culture, therefor reflects the company’s value. (Thomas, L 2012)

Apple Inc. does well in its organisational culture. That’s because their culture adheres to an ideal that self-motivated individuals will work harder if they do not have a boss micromanaging every action. This unique and successful culture helps Apple Inc. develop the most attractive products and occupy the market rapidly.

Elements of culture – corporate artefacts, shared values, shared assumption

When you walk into a hotel, a resort, a university, a bank, what do you notice first? Some other questions to ponder:

• What do “first impressions” tell you about the organisation that you have just entered?
• How friendly it will be?
• How expensive it will be?
• What kind of behaviour is expected of you?
• How will the staff approach and deal with you?
• Now look more carefully at the physical surroundings – what positive and negative signs, symbols and signals do you get?
• How exactly are these being transmitted to you?

These are all aspects of organisational culture

Cultural awareness will not only lead to more effective staffs, but also get more customers or clients and increase the customers’ loyalty. There are many elements of organisational culture, but three of them – artefacts, values, and assumptions are the key elements, organisational employees create the sets of artefacts, values, and assumptions, no single element can build corporate culture.

Corporate artefacts are the observable signs and symbols of an organisational culture, such as the corporate stories or legends, the organisation’s physical layout and the way guests are greeted, it is also a language and physical structure of the organisation, the artifact may be as formal as the staff handbook or a hotel logo, or as informal as decoration in the front lobby. Artifacts are important because they offer the best evidence about a company’s culture. In Hilton, there is a famous story, 80% hotels were closed down during the great depression in America.

Conrad Hilton

The hotel’s owner – Conrad Hilton still told his staff don’t forget the etiquette, the smile is always belong to the guests. After the Great Depression, Hilton hotels leaned into the new flourishing period and became the leader in tourism industry (Investor’s Business Daily, 2015). Values are stable, evaluative beliefs that guide organisational members preferences for goals or plans of action in a variety of situations, such as compassion, innovation, cooperation, compassion, integrity, service innovation, and the creativity. Values could demonstrate themselves in the form of corporate strategies, goals and desired qualities. Building organisational core values can guide principles and wish the employees to insist to these.

For example: Lenovo saw establishment thanks to 25,000 RMB investment in a guard house in China. Today, Lenovo is a US$21 billion personal technology company which ousts HP as world’s largest PC vendor. (Gartner 2012) Its success mainly depends on its strategy and corporate culture, its core value – innovative spirit and customer service attract more talents and customers, which help Lenovo occupy the global market. (Lenovo 2012)

Along with shared values, corporate culture consists of a deeper element – shared assumptions. These unconscious perceptions or beliefs did work so well in the past that. Thus, people now consider this the correct way to think and act toward problems and opportunities. Assumptions become so real that most probably would not discover them by surveying employees. Only by observing employees, analysing their decisions, and debriefing them about their actions would these assumptions rise to the surface. (Steven, L. 2008)

Why do executives at Lenovo, Hilton hotel group and other companies pay so much attention to organisational culture?

The answer is that they believe a strong culture is competitive advantage. Culture is one of the most precious things a company has, so the company must work harder on it than anything else the effect of organisational culture depends partly on its strength. Corporate culture strength refers to how widely and deeply employees hold the company’s dominant values and assumptions. In a strong organisational culture, most staffs across all subunits hold the predominant values. These values also rely on artefacts, which make it difficult for these values to change.

A strong corporate culture potentially increases a company’s success by serving three important functions:

1. A control system, which is a deep form of social control that influences employee decisions and behaviours.
2. Social glue, which is increasingly important as a way to attract new staff and retain top performers; and
3. sense-making process, it helps employees understand what goes on and why things happen in company.

Impact of organisational culture on tourism industry – customers decision

In tourism industry, the organisational culture also play an important role in its daily business, the organisational culture will have impact on the customers’ decision, employees’ service, the company’s brand or reputation and the revenue. Organisational culture is the most basic determinant of a person’s wants and behaviour. It comprises the basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviours that a person learns continuously in a society.

Today, most societies are in a state of flux. Culture is expressed through tangible items such as food, architecture, clothing, and art. In the minds of millions of travelers worldwide, “hotel” means “Hilton” a place where they know they will find warm hospitality, comfort, value and rewarding recognition. This brand strength, coupled with Hilton’s leading edge management systems, translates into an incredibly successful business model.

Partnering with this iconic industry, the culture of Hilton hotel group helps the corporate to attract more customers and increase its customer the loyalty indirectly.

Corporate Artefacts’ Impact on Employee Performance

Corporate culture not only have impact on customers’ decisions, but also on the employees’ satisfaction and performance, organisational culture has the potential to increase the corporate performance and employee satisfaction, the relationship between the culture and performance are that organisational culture can have a significant influence on a company’s long-term economic performance and will probably be an even more important factor in determining the success or failure of firms during the next 10 years, the impact of organisational culture is also related to the service to the guests.

Organisational culture is important in hotels, because it sets out a control mechanism. It influences the relationship between the employees and how managers make decisions. An example is where the hotel hire a new supervisor who make decisions without studying the organisational culture first. If the changes he makes conflict with the organisation culture, it will confuse the employees’ behaviour.

In Hilton, the hotel management do it specially, other hotel put the customers in the first place, but in Hilton, they also put their employees in the first place, not matter you are the general manager or the cleaner of the back area, they think that in the hospitality industry fulfilled guests are the direct result of a fulfilled staff.

The hotel offer scholarships, travel plans, health schemes for the employees, and trust, respect, understand their employees, create the relaxed working environment to build team spirit and good mood. Hilton elevator program, which helps the Hilton Group develop a large amount of talented, internationally mobile employees and try the best to make sure every of them to the management level during 5-8 years from starting this elevator program, also helps the corporate retain their talent employees and attract more new employees.

Impact on branding

Nowadays, the most important thing lead brands famous or not normally is their strong culture. Successful organisations often ask themselves: how do we continue grow and promote the continuation of organisation culture that makes them successful? Amazon purchased Zappos.com.

Why? One key reason: because of their culture and potential to innovate the customer experience on the web and “WOW” them. What are the ingredients for the kind of brand culture that will fuel your company’s sales, create customer loyalty and attract the right people to work with. When company begin to create culture, people are the company’s asset. A company existing in the world now consist lots of people – staffs, guests and suppliers. That’s why people and what they think and feel matter now more than ever before. The look of a company’s advertising, design of the web site, coolness of its mobile apps are all important, but not as important as the voice and the actions of its people.

Building a strong brand culture, then, starts with the people. The culture is not the sole ownership of the marketing team. Rather, it is that of the entire company – from the CEO to the customer service rep and everyone in between. And companies that nurture a distinct brand culture in the workplace will become a distinctive brand in the marketplace. Focus on developing your people and relationships and everything else will follow.

Culture Corporate Artefacts’ Impact on Leadership

Organisational culture can have impact on customer’s decision, employee performance and corporate brand. It also can influence the leadership. Leaders originate from culture; culture comes from leaders. Leaders must takes charge of organisations, but the organisational culture also has a huge impact on their decision-making in the workplace. If the leaders want to change something in company, their styles of leadership should adjust strategically and accommodate the organisational culture.

Leaders have the roles to decide the daily business and program of activities according the basic assumption of the organisation. If the subordinates’ behaviour are in accordance with the program of the le, the value becomes high, and vice versa when the behaviour of individuals within the organisation is far from the truth as set forth in the work program by the leader, then its value is low. Leadership is about supervising and guiding the following employees towards a unified standard or target, by broadcasting as a positive impact and using motivational strategiesrder

Phenomenon

This phenomenon can be said to be similar to the growth phase of organisation proposed by, especially in the second growth phase in which an organisation grew on the basis of guidance (direction) of a leader that has been agreed upon by the organisation.

The phenomenon can be turned around, meaning leader could be created by the organisational cultural when the leader is born as a successor (succession) in an organisation in which the organisational culture has taken hold and has become part of the life of the organisation. An example is in the organisation of government. A country or government was born from the foundations of the Constitution and the philosophy of life in which the state constitution and the philosophy of life is the basic assumption of the government culture.

New leader as the next generation will continue the previous leadership with the basic assumption that the new leader as the successor will hold and preserve the culture of the organisation. It can be said that new leader was being created by the organisational culture. This thinking has been proven by. In his research, he found that the differences of the dimensions of transformational leadership, especially is on the charisma and inspirational motivation.

U.S workers have greater leadership on the variables that focus on the vision, expected future, optimism, and enthusiasm in achieving business results. While in Germany, workers have less charisma and initiative. But there is no difference in terms of transactional leadership. Some cultural values may also predict leadership style, but only in small portions. This explains that cultural values have little affect on the leadership.

How to learn culture?

Building organisational culture should take a fairly long time. Accordingly, it will allow employees to learn the organisational culture (which can also be difficult).

Culture is broadcast to staffs in many ways. In fact, the most efficient methods are the stories, material symbols, language and material symbols. Numerous of senior Nike executive spend lots of time to be a company storytellers to promote their organisational culture. And these stories they convey are about the Nike history.

The executives always tell a story about their co-founder Bill Bowerman. Seemingly, he would pour rubber into his wife’s waffle iron to create a better running shoe. As a result, this story illustrates the innovative spirit of Nike. When the new employees hear the story of Chinese running star Liu Xiang’s battles to become a champion at the 100-meter hurdle race, especially he used Nike’s equipment, this story tells the new hires that Nike’s commitment to helping athletes.

These stories circulate through many retail shops and companies. Normally they will create a narrative about:

• co-founders;
• reductions in the workplace;
• rags-to-riches successes;
• relocation of employees, and even;
• reaction to reduce the mistakes.

The stories explain legitimate current practices and describe history.

Rituals

Rituals are repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the key values of the organisation. For instance: what goals are most important, which people are important, and which people are expendable. One of the better-know is Walmart’s company chant. These chants were the brainchild of the company’s founder, Sam Walton, as a way to motivate and unite his workforce.

“Gimme a W, gimme an A, gimme an L, gimme a squiggle, give me an M, A, R, T!” has become a ritual that bonds workers. Moreover, it reinforces Walton’s belief in the value of his employees to the company’s success. Similar corporate chants are in use from the likes of IBM, Ericsson, Novell, and Deutsche Bank.

Many organisations and subunits rely on certain styles of language. This can to help members identify with culture, attest to their acceptance of it, and help preserve it. Unique terms describe equipment, officers, key individuals, suppliers, customers, or products that relate to the business. New employees may at first be overwhelmed by acronyms and jargon, that once assimilated, act as a common denominator to unite members of a given culture or subculture. If you are a new employee at Boeing, you will find yourself learning a unique vocabulary, including Boeing online data, etc.

Conclusion

Organisational culture has three main functions. It is the “bridge” that connect people together and makes them feel part of the organisational experience. corporate culture helps employees make sense of the workplace. Third, It is also a deeply embedded form of social control. Organisations with strong cultures normally perform better than those with weak cultures, but only when the cultural content is suit for the company’s environment.

Also, the culture should not be so strong that it drives out dissenting values, which may form emerging values for the future. As a manager, you can help the company shape the culture. All managers work together and can especially do their part to consider spiritually and its role in creating a positive organisational culture and to create the organisational culture. Often you can do as much as to shape your organisational culture as the culture of the organisation shapes you.

References

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• Meisenbach, R., & Brandhorst, J. (2018). Organizational Culture. The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483329635.n8
• Lamo, E. (2019), The Center of Success: A Case Study on Hilton’s Company Culture, A Senior Project presented to the Faculty of the Department of Experience Industry Management, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
• George, O., Owoyemi, O., & Onakala, U. (2012). Theorising the Concept of Organisational Artefacts: How It Enhances the Development of Corporate/Organisational Identity. International Journal of Business Administration, 3, 37-43. https://doi.org/10.5430/IJBA.V3N4P37
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• Allott, D. Investor’s Business Daily, 2015. Conrad Hilton Was As Solid As The Hotels He Built. [Online]. [10 May 2025]. Available from: https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/conrad-hilton-built-hotel-empire-on-optimism-and-innovation/.