Organizational culture, behavior, and communication in business strategy

Organizational Behavior Terminology and Concepts

Organizational Culture

An organization's cultural composition encompasses a wide array of structural variables, all of which comprise the ultimate operational atmosphere of the company. Productive capacities and efficiency levels are almost always determined by the effectiveness and receptiveness of an organization's culture. The culture within an organization is also a key determinant of why and how leadership bodies will integrate strategic decisions. Depending of the various specificities of the firm and its respective industry, some firms will design their organizational cultures and leadership models with an authoritative metric, while others will promote a more participatory and collaborative technique in the company's cultural atmosphere. Ideally, an organization's culture will be receptive and help to easily facilitate strategic decisions and initiatives to further increase the profitability of the firm.

Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior entails the various models used in strategic decision-making and goal setting and the subsequent actions taken to fulfill the selected objectives. The behavior of an organization also has a very wide range of determinants. These factors can be both internal and external in nature. Most often, internal determinants arise in the form of productive capacities, structural configurations, leadership styles and design capabilities. External determinants of an organization's behavior, on the other hand, regularly include industrial factors, transportation and fuel costs, market trends, consumer behavior and the availability of raw materials . All of these aforementioned factors must be taken into consideration by firms when they are assessing the most feasible means by which they will aim to achieve their respective goals.

Diversity

The word 'diversity' can be used in many ways when speaking in an organizational context. An organization could be considered diverse if it were to employ a wide array of ethnicities in its labor pool. Knowing the global nature of business today, this type of diversity is becoming much more common and highly effective in learning to meet the demands of foreign markets. Another type of organizational diversity is implied when an organization branches out into several operational areas. Once again, with the tumultuous nature of many markets in the modern world, this type of diversification can be very useful in providing productive insurance (as well as new opportunities) to firms hoping to grow long into the future.

Organizational Culture at Apple

A perfect template for examining a highly functional organizational culture and subsequently progressive organization behavior can be found in the corporate analysis of the Apple Corporation. This company was "treading water" until their progressive and innovation-promoting CEO Steve Jobs returned to the company ten years ago (Anthony, 2010, p. 1). Upon his arrival, Jobs became increasingly participative in the innovation and design process. The results of this technique culminated in the creation of relaxed and collaborative cultural components, which have been shown to be excellent promoters of innovative behavior . Mr. Jobs and his faithful designers went on to instill several revolutionary initiatives that have since made Apple the third most valuable company in the world (Anthony, 2010). He was also directly involved in the firm's cultural and systematic shift away from focusing solely on the actual creation of great products and towards the creation of better business models. And being that the right cultural metric is often the first (and most important) step to initiating innovation within a firm, the potentiality of this shift becomes all the more profound . Accordingly, Apple designers have since begun to concentrate more on the origination of new ways to create and deliver such products, while also precisely capturing their ultimate value (Anthony, 2010).