Culture Difference

There are a lot of definitions of culture, we can name some:
“That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (Edward Tyler -1871).

It could say too that culture involves two main human activities, what people think and what people do.

Also culture is a symbolic of communication and style of this communication, which is socially transmitted or socially learning, so, it became in a way of life of a group of people commonly living in the same geographic place. That culture is knowledge to cumulate by years, share, learned and transmit generation by generation through formal or informal social interaction, generally without thinking about them. They share behaviors experience, believes, attitudes, patterns, implicit and explicit, values, religion, meaning, hierarchies, notion of time, concepts of the universe, spatial relation, technology, cuisine, art, music, literature, ideology, social conventions, gender roles, festivals, holidays, social structure, symbols that they accept.

All of these elements have influence in organization and business. Understanding culture is fundamental to the analysis of organizational phenomena, these phenomena culture began investigating as early as the 1930s, by Hawthorne at the Western Electric Company, who did studies about the culture to try to understand the work environment, because he knew that the organizational culture is important to achieve performance successes in the organizations.

Definition of Organizational culture are numerous, one general definition offered by Edgar Schein of MIT’s Sloan School of Management is:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”.

It could say that organizational culture is constructed socially and is affected by the environment, because the individuals need language, communications and intercultural skills to build relationships and to achieve the goals.

One of those things is that there are differences in way, rules and norms of communications between people with different backgrounds cultures and experiences. Globalization has produced workforce with the diverse cultural background in the same workplace, FitzGerald – 2003 and Samovar 1991, said:
“ In the study of human interaction, it is important to look at cultural values, but in the study of intercultural communication it is crucial”

Culture is also a particular way to solving problems, because people of different cultures solve similar problems in different ways. Culture is important between individuals and companies in international areas, these factors are related to issues administrative, strategic and relational.
“National culture influences the behavior of the people involved in organizations and in the way they handle” (Trompenaars, 1993).