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¶ … organization whose culture will be studied is FedEx, in particular the Express division of the company. FedEx is an overnight courier company, and its culture, leadership style and management practices are largely based on the U.S. Marine Corp (Smith, 2008).

There are a number of ways to categorize organizational culture. According to McNamara (2000), FedEx would fit into the club culture. This culture is defined as holding that the most important thing for the employee is that he/she becomes part of the group. Such cultures are hierarchical in nature, and value seniority. The military is cited as an example, and FedEx exhibits many of these traits. New employees are indoctrinated into the corporate culture, using symbols (the color purple is one) and legends, many of which are stories of employees in the early years of the company going above and beyond the call of duty to make FedEx what it is today. Within the company, there is room among senior managers to move up without the seniority process but for lower level positions seniority is critical within business units. This is in part because the job description does not change between employees of the same unit (for example a group of couriers) so job performance and seniority are the only ways to distinguish employees. Seniority is the preferred method at FedEx.

Bauer and Erdogan (n.d.) provide a typology for categorizing culture. Within that typology, FedEx is a stable culture. The company actually has a motto of "people-service-profit" where the people come first but the organizational culture at FedEx bears more similarities to the stable culture. This type of culture emphasizes predictability, rule orientation, and bureaucracy. The objective is to align people to achieve the greatest levels of efficiency. Efficiency is important at FedEx, and the company performs the same routine tasks day in and day out, something that emphasizes the benefits of a stable organizational culture. To counteract the reality that stable cultures inhibit fast response times, FedEx has built into its business a certain amount of flexibility. This is normally with respect to casual employees and leases on vehicles and aircraft that allow the company to alter its capacity according to the needs of the market. In other aspects of the business, FedEx still moves relatively slowly.

In order to promote stability, FedEx does not engage in layoffs other than of casual employees. The company seeks to maintain a stable workforce that already understands the corporate culture. Many employees wear uniforms, if they are going to be in public, and this helps to ensure that everybody is an active participant in the business and culture. FedEx also builds its culture into its evaluation criteria. Unless an office has a difficult time finding employees, FedEx ensures that it hires people who share the company's values and can work within the system. Promotions are the same. The emphasis in the culture is on seniority, so FedEx uses that as one of its main criteria for promoting its employees. This does not emphasize ability and provides little motivation for the employees, but the company wants employees that are intrinsically motivated to do a good job, much like in the Marines. Thus, the different elements of FedEx's human resource policy fit well with the type of culture that the company has and wishes to maintain.