Learning Culture as the Enabler of Business Transformation

Business organizations experience not only episodic but also continuous and disruptive changes. Those changes make the organization need not only transitional and developmental but also transformational initiatives. Based on business transformational experience in many prominent companies, organizational culture was one of eight factors that make transformation fail. Organizational culture plays a strategic role in business transformations and management. It can be an asset or liability for business transformation. The development of organizational culture should not only impact on work engagement but also learning agility of people in the organization. Based on the impact, organizational culture can be differentiated from the hierarchal-centralistic culture and the learning culture. By using the concept of culture map, learning culture is mapped and reflected into eight dimensions: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and scheduling. By mapping the culture gap of the current condition, management practitioner has a road map for developing the learning culture.

Public Sector Organizational Culture: Experience from Frontline Bureaucracies

This chapter discusses the practice of organizational culture by the frontline bureaucrats in Bangladesh. Culture scholars argue that organizational culture—commonly defined as the beliefs, values, attitudes, and practices of the members of an organization—is a powerful force in determining the health and well-being of an organization. Scholars also suggest the existence of different dimensions of organizational culture. Although they do not agree in naming these dimensions, commonalities are found in their understanding. How organizational culture is practiced by the frontline bureaucrats in Bangladesh has not been studied much. A study was designed to know how the frontline public bureaucrats practice organizational culture and how they differ in their practices along their service lines. Four dimensions of organizational culture—power distance, uncertainty avoidance tendency, participation, and team orientation—were considered. The chosen culture dimensions impact the overall management of any public sector organization. Three hundred and twenty-six frontline public bureaucrats were studied using a survey questionnaire. Both descriptive and inferential statistics have been used for analyzing the collected data. Findings from independent samples t-tests revealed that the frontline bureaucrats significantly differ along their service lines in practicing the culture dimensions.

Towards the Development of the Informal Economy: The Case of Street Trading in Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Previously, scholars in Nigeria have argued for and against the continuing existence of street trading activity in cities but no known study had examined how street trading could be developed. This chapter seeks to provide empirical evidence for its characteristics, values and challenges in order to provide insights into how street traders could be supported to make their trading activity more productive and sustainable. Findings showed that the street traders need entrepreneurship education, financial support and favourable regulatory measures to facilitate the development of their trades. The chapter concludes that street trading could be highly productive and sustainable if adequately supported.

Rethinking Innovative Learning Opportunities for Teachers in Educational Organizations toward Education 4.0

Teacher behaviors play a key role in forming and shaping organizational culture in schools. The current innovative and leadership-based learning objectives introduced by Education 4.0 have made the transformation obligatory from traditional classrooms of the industrial society to creation of digital classrooms. This transformation will embrace digital curriculum that might impact learning outcomes and reduce in-class management. How is it different from traditional classrooms? The spaces in a digital classroom are both digital and physical. This environment asks for future creative convergence talents, thus giving teachers new tasks to take greater ownership of change processes of their school culture. This shift also requires creation of reflective learning communities together with a redefinition of the meaning and scope of teacher supervision. This study introduces, a “Teacher Competency Development Model,” in which innovative learning opportunities for teachers in educational organizations toward Education 4.0 are offered through innovative models in teacher supervision based on cognitive, reflective, and peer coaching and their utilization within the educational contexts. Within this framework, the contents and strategies of three supervision models, namely, reflective, cognitive, and peer coaching to be able to help teachers survive and cope with their adaptation to Education 4.0 will be discussed.

Organizational Culture under Religious Influence

Based on a review of articles and other published research work as well as the results of the author’s research conducted in organizations operating in religiously diverse environments in Poland, this chapter examines the influence of religion on organizational culture. The most important findings of this work concern the vital role religion plays in an organization and its culture. This paper examines religion’s influence on organizational culture, which is considered as an independent variable. It proposes a model of organizational culture enriched by the channel by which religion enters the organization’s set of values and norms. The chapter consists of the following parts: the analysis of the role of religion in an organization in the light of hitherto research, cultural dimensions of religion, analytical approaches to organizational culture, the integrated model of organizational culture enhanced by the aspect of religion, and the research results confirming the influence of Catholic and Orthodox religions on organizational culture.

Effects of Information Technologies on Organizational Culture: A Discussion Based on the Key Role of Organizational Structure

This chapter discusses the influences of information technologies on cultural features of organizations with an emphasis on the concept of “organizational structure” because research shows that organizational culture and organizational structure are in a very close relationship. In this regard, it argues that information technologies can have direct and indirect effects on organizational cultures based on the information technologies’ influences on organizational structures and the processes, activities, and human relations within these structures. Underlining different and controversial approaches and findings in the literature, this study makes some deductions by referring to important features of information technologies and organizational culture. Therefore, the approaches and evaluations given here are thought to be useful for the practitioners and students who are interested in the subject and the academic staff who are interested in doing research on this subject.

Correlation among Human Resource Flexibility Strategy, Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Organizational Performance in Ecotourism Industry

To satisfy the demands for production peak, reduce personnel costs for labor, limit the increase of employees in enterprises, and focus on corporate specialty to develop the competitive advantage, enterprises would generally apply human resource flexibility strategy to achieve the objectives. The practice of human resource flexibility strategy would change work-related characteristics; besides, the effect of the system on employees would decide the effort, absenteeism, or turnover. Aiming at supervisors and employees in ecotourism, as the research objects, a total of 500 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 351 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate of 70%. The research results reveal positive and significant effects of 1. human resource flexibility strategy on organizational citizenship behavior, 2. organizational citizenship behavior on organizational performance, and 3. human resource flexibility strategy on organizational performance. According to the results, suggestions are eventually proposed, expecting to provide essential assistance for the human resource flexibility strategy in ecotourism and assist in the sustainable development.

Communication and Organizational Culture

When people in an organization understand themselves and their context of interaction from very different perspectives, there is an increased risk of poor organizational dialogue. The reason is not only that individuals’ social interpretations of others are influenced by their idiosyncratic perspectives. In interactions involving a significant diversity of individual perspectives, there is also a risk that communicators form radically different interpretations of goals and processes in the organization. It is therefore of crucial importance that people have a sufficiently similar understanding of action-guiding information, communicative acts and the workplace itself. The chapter focuses on the importance of creating shared organizational culture on the basis of four communication conditions from social interaction theory. (1) In communicative processes, senders need to secure the attention of audiences. (2) Senders and audiences need to have a sufficiently similar understanding of the language that is used. (3) Senders and audiences need to interpret communicative acts in a sufficiently similar way. (4) The attitudes and values that audiences ascribe to senders must correspond to the values and attitudes that senders actually have. After having clarified these conditions, the chapter applies them to analyse fundamental organizational challenges. The final part of the chapter argues that the conditions can, typically on management levels, constitute conceptual tools for creating unifying communicative cultures. Furthermore, using the conditions (1)–(4) actively as a means for securing communication across a diversity of individual perspectives can contribute to reaching organizational goals, no matter how they are defined.

Zionist Organizations in Voronezh

The chapter is based on materials from the archives and investigations of the OGPU of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The last years of the XIX century and the first twentieth century became a time of rapid development and strengthening of the Zionist movement in Russia developed rapidly. In 1902, over a thousand disparate Zionist organizations merged into the Russian Zionist Organization (RNO). In this article, we will consider the processes taking place in a separate region of Russia - the Central Black Earth Region (CCO). Voronezh became the center of the Central Council in 1928.