ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE - A ROOT TO PROSPERITY

"Organisational Culture" is an infinite term. It can't be actually bounded in definitions. It lays the foundation of an organisation, builds and nurtures it, defines its purpose, sets its direction, prioritizes its tasks, guides its strategies, behaviour of its people and ultimately delivers its results. The performance of the organisations is a result of its cultural effect. This can also be seen inversely; i.e., performance can be used to measure the effectiveness of culture, moreover its features like its consistency, the average results can be used to analyse the type of the organisational culture, the problems underlying that culture and the hidden alternative solutions. On one hand, culture proves to be the soul of organisation and organisations are finding ways to establish excellent culture, on the other hand 'Culture' is being used as a strategic tool by big organisations and MNCs. They strategically shift among different cultures and try to offer cross-cultural products and services to different segments of customers thus are increasing their market share and customer base. Culture is being used as an 'emotional tool' to establish relationship with customers. Successful organisations adopts incremental cultural change as a part of their strategy, but, many times today's dynamic environment demands sudden cultural change which organisations has to recognize and go to through the process very carefully. This process demands different variables to be analysed and their relationships with one another. The other way organisations are preferring cultural change is to utilize their own strength at a full pace by implementing any new business strategy, thus eliminating 'Strategy Culture Congruence'. Many big organisations such as Hindustan Unilever,TVS Motors, Hewlett Packard, Infosys etc. have gone through cultural change as a part of their strategy and have fantastically used it to maintain their high performance and a positive organisational image in the society. Thus, organisational culture in this dynamic world is a magical weapon as its effect can be seen since from the vision of any organisation, to its direction, activities, strategies, behaviour, performance and ultimately its image. Every element of the organisation can be controlled by it; moreover, it is the unique weapon which can change itself also as a part of strategic requirements. This paper is also a contribution towards expressing how a culture builds an organisation.