Principles of Management

An organizational culture can be defined as the environment within an organization that takes care of the values and beliefs that are shared and that influence the members' behavior in the organization. It can also be extensively defined as referring to the customs, beliefs and values of an organization. While the structure of an organization can be easy to explain and draw, the culture of an organization is not that direct. Organizations which perform highly are developed, nurtured, and driven by the executive at the top.

Organizational culture guides the manner in which people communicate, think, and respond to issues like: teamwork, risk taking, collaboration, accountability, and decision making. Values determine the behavior of an organization to a great extent. Whereas values are not observable directly as are behaviors, people will always tend to attribute to the stated values, their behaviors. Cultures originate from leaders who enforce their assumptions and own values on a group (Ornstein & Lunenburg, 2007).

The core values that might be found in high-performance organization cultures include, but are not limited to the following; social validation, time and space, human activities, family, human nature, importance of work, and self-development. Social validation means that values are only confirmed by the social experience shared by the whole group. An example is that, any culture cannot have enough claims that its moral system and religion are better than another's, but if each others' values and beliefs are reinforced by the members, they are all not taken seriously. The experience and perception of time are the very central aspects of organizational functions. Time is always a symbolic category fundamentally used for discussing orderliness of people's lives socially (Schein, 2010). Other values include; behavioral regularities, dominant values, norms, rules, philosophy, and even feelings. When members of an organization interact, they usually communicate using common terminologies and language. Their ceremonies and rituals are related which shows the culture of togetherness. There are some standards of behavior that usually evolve in work groups such as, "a day's work for a day's pay - all fair." These impacts by group norms always result in high levels of performance. Philosophy refers to the policies that guide organizations' beliefs on how their employees together with clients are to be attended to. This is often seen in the organizations' mission statements.   There are always guidelines laid down as rules that even the newcomers are required to learn for them to be accepted as members of the organization. These rules are also used in the daily organizational operations for getting along. Feelings refer to the overall atmosphere displayed in the organization, by its layout and the manner in which its affiliates interrelate with the outsiders or the clients (Ornstein & Lunenburg, 2007).  

An ethical dilemma is always broadly defined as a situation where one's personal ethics are in conflict with others. It is a conflict of moral imperatives that simply mean that one's ethics are breached by the others. Ethical dilemmas may include: discrimination, conflicts of interest, organizational resources, sexual harassment, and even customer confidence.  When leaders in an organization act ethically, they usually have an impact on the workers in the workplace. For managers, their ethical dilemmas involve, more often than not, conflicts with subordinates, customers, and superiors over matters like honesty in the modes of communications and advertisement, as well as doing things viewed to be unethical, by their bosses. An ethical dilemma is inherent when one has to decide on whether or not he wants to follow a line of action that, even though it gives the possibility of organizational or personal benefit, it still may be considered as unethical. Common rationalizations involving behaviors that are unethical include the belief that the behavior is in the best interest of everyone, it is legal, will get the support of the organization, and will not be noticed (Schein, 2010).

Culture can be defined as the pattern of basic assumptions a group learns as it solves its problems of internal integration and external adaptation, that works well enough to be considered suitable to be taught to the other members, new to the organization, as the rightful way to think and perceive relative to the problems. Regulations of the common order dominating our day-to-day relations always become the base of culture. These regulations are learned as we socialize into our families and into our ethnic groups and nations. The stability and strength of culture is derived from the fact that it is often group based; that is to say, the individual has to hold on to some assumptions to confirm his being a member of the group (Schein, 2010). An organization's culture usually affects a lot of administrative processes. These may include; leadership, motivation, communication, decision making, and change. Culture also has an effect on the organization's structural procedures. The evaluation system, selection process, reward system, and control system must, at all times, fit with the culture of the organization. Culture, in addition, has a serious influence on the performance of employees and the effectiveness of the organization. Managers, on the other hand, are evaluated based on the achieved results; therefore, the culture of an organization is a concept quite important because of its results (Ornstein & Lunenburg, 2007).

A multinational corporation (MNC) is a company that has got active branches outside the home country that it controls and operates on effectively. The host-country complaints include the fact that they may not benefit from spillovers unless their level of skills reaches a certain threshold level. The entry into the host country, by an MNC may largely bring new ideas, but on the other hand, it also increases competition that eventually lowers the economies of scale of the host country. Basically, the host country will always fear the concentration of both the political and market power of the MNCs. The come-countries on the other hand complain of high trade barriers and high transport costs imposed on them in the host-countries. The MNCs are also forced to train and absorb local workers, export some guaranteed proportions of their own output, and pay taxes proportions reasonable to the businesses they do locally (Eicher, Mutti, & Turnovsky, 2009).