This paper examines FedEx's corporate culture through the lens of Gareth Morgan's "Organizations as Cultures" framework. It traces how FedEx founder Fred Smith's military-influenced leadership style, combined with a rich body of company folklore, rituals, and symbols, created a cohesive organizational identity capable of uniting diverse employee groups. The paper analyzes how FedEx's formal organizational structure and cultural development operate as mutually reinforcing systems, and explores the strategies the company used to successfully transplant its core cultural values across more than 100 countries while allowing local subcultures to flourish. The result is a culture considered by management to be as vital to operations as any structural system.
Since its inception, FedEx has created its own social reality. The company recognized early on that organizational effectiveness requires strong employee buy-in, and that total employee buy-in requires fostering a culture that supports organizational goals. Because their business model required that any given package — and by extension, any given customer — be handled by upwards of a dozen people on its journey, the culture had to be uniform throughout the organization. Compounding this was the fact that when the company started, it was in a unique business: it intended to raise the bar on effectiveness in the shipping industry. To accomplish this demanded that FedEx create its own reality, because operating within any existing industry reality would have resulted in failure.
Bringing together disparate groups such as pilots, handlers, couriers, and management required a focused set of images, rituals, and symbols. This paper examines how FedEx achieved that unity through the lens of Gareth Morgan's framework in Chapter 5 of Images of Organization, "Organizations as Cultures."
Rituals at FedEx included daily meetings, images were built around a strong body of corporate folklore, and symbols were reinforced through corporate publications. The folklore has proven especially powerful. FedEx is a business in which tens of thousands of employees perform tens of millions of individual transactions in a given day, yet the many disparate groups of employees are brought together by a compact catalogue of corporate lore.
Stories about the sacrifices employees made when the firm was in its infancy are repeated not just during initial training but beyond — in videos and among employees themselves. The importance of each task is highlighted by lore as well, such as stories about couriers driving four hours out of their way to retrieve a single forgotten package, management going out to deliver packages when demand dramatically exceeded expectations, and pilots forgoing pay to carry the company through its critical first holiday season. The lore and legends at FedEx are an integral part of its culture (p. 126) and serve to inspire current employees to live up to these same ideals, even though they are unlikely to encounter such adverse circumstances at this point in the organization's life.
According to organizational culture theory, shared stories and rituals function as powerful mechanisms for socializing new members and sustaining collective identity — a dynamic clearly at work throughout FedEx's history.
The lore itself is cultivated by management from the company's early years specifically to propagate the culture among today's employees. This is a direct recognition of Morgan's claim that historical circumstances shape the present (p. 125). Morgan further argues that the fundamental nature of an organization rests as much in its corporate culture as in its formal organization. At FedEx, the two are given equal weight: formal organization is meticulous, but so is the development of culture. Indeed, the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship, deemed necessary given the complex logistics FedEx relies upon.
Another key component of the culture at FedEx is the leadership style of founder Fred Smith. An ex-military man, Smith adopted a leadership approach heavily influenced by military values. There was no existing model for overnight delivery, and launching one required several things, all of which were shaped by Smith's values and leadership style (p. 128). One was complete dedication to the company: Smith invested all of his personal capital to start FedEx and steered the company through some extremely difficult periods in its early life. Another was the concept of teamwork and the forging of camaraderie. This was led from the top, with Smith not only working closely with all aspects of the firm but demanding that every group work closely together as well. This dedicated, tough, yet team-oriented style flowed directly from Smith's leadership and became a defining feature of the corporate culture.
"Smith's military values shaping company culture"
"Exporting FedEx culture to over 100 countries"
Culture at FedEx is not only strong, but is given equal weight by management alongside the company's operational structure. Both are considered vital to the company's objectives, and both must be implemented with equal success in order for the company to be effective. Morgan's framework for understanding organizations as cultures finds perhaps no better real-world illustration than the story of how FedEx built, sustained, and exported its organizational identity across the globe.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization: Executive Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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