The Impact of Organizational Culture on Strategy Implementation

Organizational culture includes the shared beliefs, norms and values within an organization. It sets the foundation for strategy. For a strategy within an organization to develop and be implemented successfully, it must fully align with the organizational culture. Thus, initiatives and goals must be established within an organization to support and establish an organizational culture that embraces the organization’s strategy over time.

Organizations that remain flexible are more likely to embrace change and create an environment that remains open to production and communication. This provides a model that welcomes cultural diversity and helps clarify strategy implementation. Culture within an organization can serve many purposes, including to unify members within an organization and help create a set of common norms or rules within an organization that employees follow.

A stable culture, one that will systematically support strategy implementation, is one that fosters a culture of partnership, unity, teamwork and cooperation among employees. This type of corporate culture will enhance commitment among employees and focus on productivity within the organization rather than resistance to rules and regulations or external factors that prohibit success.

Flexible, strong and unified cultures will approach strategy implementation and affect implementation in a positive manner by aligning goals. Goals can come into alignment when the organizational culture works to focus on productivity and getting the organization’s primary mission accomplished. This may include getting products delivered to customers on time, shipping out more products than the organization’s chief competitor or similar goals. This will create a domino effect in the organization that ensures that all work performed by each individual in the company and work group focuses on performance and on the strategic importance of the company.

This allows culture to align with strategy implementation at the most basic level. For this level of unification to work, goal setting must align with and be supported by systems, policies, procedures and processes within the organization, thereby helping to achieve strategy implementation and continuing the cultural integrity of the organization.

Part of cultural alignment and strategy implementation involves process implementation. Processes include utilizing technology to facilitate goal attainment and the results a company is looking for when working with customers to meet their needs. While most of the time the hard problems and needs of an organization get met, the culture becomes neglected in the process. That is where processes come into place and strategy implementation gradually comes into existence to uphold and maintain organizational culture and strategies.

When culture aligns with strategy implementation, an organization is able to more efficiently operate in the global marketplace. Culture allows organizational leaders to work both individually and as teams to develop strategic initiatives within the organization. These may include building new partnerships and re-establishing old ones to continue delivering the best possible products and services to a global market