Organizational Culture

Cultue is one of the important component of every organization. We can say that, organizations are made up of tangible and intangible elements. Organizational structure, strategy, technology and resources are tangible elements, and culture, values, attitudes and beliefs are the intangible elements of an organization.

Organizational culture is usually defined as the collection of norms and values to help employees in line with others. And the components of organizational culture can be summarized as; sense of self and space, communication and language, dress and appearance, time consciousness, relationships, values and norms, mental process and learning and work habits.

According to Hofstede, culture is collectively held values. And, he defines that culture has five dimensions (power distance, individualism-collectivism, quantity of life-quality of life, Uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation-short term orientation, masculinity-feminity)

When we have a look at Nissan and its cultural problems, we can analyze it into three parts. Nissan’s problems caused by national cultural issues, problems caused by corporate cultural issues and Carlos Ghosn’s (COO of Nissan) definition of problems caused by cultural issues.

National Culture Issues ( Values and Norms)

One of the problems was about mura-shakai consensus based society system, which means conscientiousness and cooperation are the key elements of business life. Consequently, Japanese professionals were avoiding all mistakes in order to protect their career advancement,

there were long hours of meetings for decision making. And, they were blaming each other. Briefly, processes were replaced by rules and conformity.

The other problem was about cultural tenet called Nennkoulyoretu, in Japan age, education, number of years of service were the main elements of performance. This was useful for productivity, however it slowed down company’s decision making process.

And, when employees sensed that there is a problem in the company, they believe that their department is working optimally. Because, troubled employees were always bailed out by government of Japan.

Corporate Cultural Issues

As described above there were problems about Japanese values which prevent Nissan to be successful. However, there were also corporate problems associated with company procedures.

After decision making process, decisions were not monitored like other Japanese firms. And, Nissan’s strategy was not customer oriented. Besides, there were internal communication problems, employees were not aware of corporate business decisions.

Carlos’s Definition of Problems caused by Cultural Issues

Carlos discovered that major problems were lack of vision from top management and

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