Managing the Organization Culture in Domestic and Foreign Operations

Abstract

Organizations develop their own cultures that reflect their shared values, norms, and preferred approaches to attain
their goals and solve problems. Such organization cultures condition the employees ways of thinking; interpersonal
relations; and perceptions of what is the right thing to do and what is not, what is an acceptable pattern of behavior
and what is not, and what is good for the enterprise and what is not. Organization cultures, however, encounter
multiple challenges once companies expand their operations geographically, particularly when they enter foreign
markets and start to operate subsidiaries in diverse cultural, political, sociological, and economic environments. A
main question addressed in this paper is: To what extent can and should organization cultures remain intact in highly
diverse environments? To address this problem, the meaning and significance of organization cultures will first be
explored; then the analysis will focus on the challenges that multinational enterprises face in managing their
organization cultures in the complex global environment.