Research On Corporate Culture And Development Of Private Enterprises

The theory of corporate culture originated from U.S.A. in 1980s, and was introduced into china at the middle of 1980s. Although there are great numbers of literature about corporate culture, very few are combined with economics and management. The basic idea of this article is: there are many factors which will affect development of private corporation, but the critical one to sustained development of private enterprises is corporate culture. Core value brings corporate culture force by an integration of different kinds of values. The force is important content of core competence, and the foundation of corporate core competence. It affects private corporation's abilities of business, management and innovation, and finally embodies specific competence of its products and service.Upon this main standpoint, this paper begins with an analysis of basic theory of corporate culture. Firstly, card the definition of corporate culture. Secondly, according to structure and functions of corporate culture, corporate culture consists of apparent part and unapparent part, which can be divided into three layers: surface layer culture , middle layer culture and deep layer culture. Value, corporate spirit and corporate ethic belong to corporate spirit culture, which is the core part of corporate culture. According to function, we can see that corporate culture has guiding function, stimulating function, cohesive function, restraining function and integrating function, among these, guiding function is the most important one. The essence of function of corporate culture is to "govern thought", which equals to solve staff's thought and recognition, settle the problem of cohesive force and centripetal force.. Thirdly, from the point of view of New Institutional Economics, corporate culture is the informal institution, it can save transaction costs, overcome the long confused problem of "free ride", reduce the costs of carrying out the formal institution, and what is more important is it give impetus to innovation and enterprising spirit. So, it will produce great effect that is equal to the definition of Property Rights. The "Team Spirit" in corporate operation can efficiently restrict staff's laziness during working as well as the ethic risks so as to achieve high efficiency of "team production" and "collaborative labor". Under incomplete information condition, corporate needs to form certain "culture" to make up the lake of formal institution. From its characterand function, we can see that corporate culture is very similar with social capital. It is a special social capital, called corporate culture capital. The essence of corporate culture capital is to form atmosphere of trust each other and cooperation.In order to study corporate culture, international comparision is necessary. First, because of different history background, there form different cultures, and national culture affects corporate culture greatly, which results in corporate culture's difference among American, Japanese and china's private corporations. The characters of American corporate culture: focus on exertion of person's abilities and entrepreneurs' effect, lay stress on construction of corporate values, attach importance to contract rather than feelings, pardon staff's failure, encourage risk and innovation, consumers are equal to God, and win success by high quality. The characters of Japanese corporate culture are: pursue profit as well as make contribution to country, corporate clanization, people get together to compete, management means education, pay attention to emotional motivation, focus on organization's harmonious atmosphere, have strong cognition for crisis. Lunyu plus abacus—careful calculation and strict budget. The characters of China's private corporate culture are: benevolence, sincere and trust, high Tightness, light profit and give consideration to the both, harmony is excellent, talented person is fundament, corporate is home to return to, high human sympathy and relationship and light institution, advocate corporate social responsibility, diligent to study and good at thinking, provide best service for customers, emphasize innovative cognitions, stress on staffs development and their abilities to exert, and zero fault idea and so on. From the value system and the ways of action, we can find that there are both similar points and different points among corporate culture of Japanese, American and Chinese private corporations. Different national corporate culture can learn from each other, but the essence is still one's own national traditional culture. Talented person is fundament, Customer is supreme, win by quality, encourage innovation, emphasize honesty, and team collaboration, are the same trend of these three countries' corporate culture. But each country's corporate culture has its own advantages and characteristic. The thesis also points out that organizational systems are resulted from cultural selection under different circumstance. The governance structure in American corporation and its corporate system stressing on contract relationships are resulted from cultural selection centered on individualism. The system centered on bank, the system in line with qualifications and record of service, the system of lifelong employment and labor union constructionin line with corporation are resulted from cultural selection centered on Groupism. And the family system and pan-family system are also resulted from cultural selection centered on clanism.Resource will dry up, only culture will go on. There are many factors that will affect private corporate, and the most important factor that affects sustained development of corporations is corporate culture. Corporate culture is the motive force for sustained development of private corporations, and it is also the core competence of a corporation. First, corporate culture can save the costs of monitoring and restricting, affect corporate long performance, and finally determine corporate success or failure. Second, corporate culture is corporate core competence. Although scholars from home and abroad have different definitions on core competence, but core competence is an ability that is owned by corporation uniquely, but can't be imitated and substituted, and will bring in sustained development. It is the comprehensive ability to integrate different kinds of resources. Author thinks that material resources, capital, core production, core technology, talented person, competitive advantage and institution are not the core competence. Innovation ability, management ability, business ability and corporate culture force are key factors of core competence, but corporate cultural core competence is the foundation of core competence. Core value brings corporate culture force by integration of values, and then the force affects innovative ability, management ability and business ability, lastly embodies specific competence. Third, corporate culture has its own life cycle, called corporate culture life cycle. At the beginning of starting up a corporate, start-up passion, ambition and innovative spirit, spirit loyal to career and values of the entrepreneur will be dominant in corporate culture, but corporate core value, direction of development and object is not definite. At corporate growing period, characteristic corporate culture forms, and corporate culture begins to take effect gradually. Due to quick expansion, corporate needs an united value to control the overall situation, to direct corporate development when corporations enter into the mature period. Meanwhile, corporate culture will also become mature, and its position as core competence will be apparent. But, corporate culture's malpractice also appears meanwhile, bureaucratism begins to come into being, entrepreneur wants to keep in a steady situation, and will be afraid to make changes, corporate doesn't have enough motive force to innovate. When it comes to decline period, thoughts and conceptions are obsolete, lacks of cognition of innovation, staff begin to lose confidence,organizational structure becomes rigid and internal contradiction happens now and then. At this moment, the inertia of corporate culture becomes a major factor that hinders corporate development. Therefore, it is an inevitable choice to reform corporate culture. During the evolution of corporate culture, only the core value keep stead, all of others will change. So, we should persist corporate core value, and adjust other corporate culture if necessary, make corporate culture suitable to requirements of different stages of corporate life cycle and be the pillar and lasting motive force for corporate sustained development.There are strong and weak, good and bad, suitable and unsuitable cultures. This paper selects successful private corporations below to verify corporate culture core competence in the positive aspect, because weak or bad culture cannot form corporate culture core competence. This corporations are Tongrentang, Fangtai, Fuxing, Guomei, Wumei, UTstarcom, Hainan Airline, Xinao, Xinxiwang, Tongfang, Zhengtai, Huali and Huawei. First, among these successful corporations, there is respectively characteristic corporate culture. Second, corporate culture force is one part of core competence. Corporate cultural core competence among the above corporations is respectively strong or very strong. Third, Eastern or Western culture is helpful to the development of private enterprises. Forth, the success of combination of state owned enterprises and private mechanism is the merger of corporate culture. Finally, talented person is fundament of the development, but it needs corporate culture to "govern thought".However, there are many cultural barriers during the process of development of private corporations in our country. Firstly, ignoring the cultivation and accumulation of the corporate cultural capitals. Secondly, the cognition of corporate culture core competitiveness is badly insufficient o It is mainly that mistaken ideas still exist in the cognition of corporate culture, making corporate culture simplify and superficialize, and regard it as a thing to glorify companies' eager for quick successes. Core value is fuzzy. The corporate ethics is ignored. The corporate culture lacks personality. Thirdly, traditional cultural capital has defects, including lacking social faith, the traditional "divided family culture" being deeply rooted and being excessive to submit to restrain innovation. Fourthly, the corporate culture can't advance with time, that is to say it can't reform the corporate culture conception in time according to the cycles of corporations, which makes the change of the corporate culture lag behind the development of corporations. To solve these problems, the first thing to do is tostrengthen the institutional construction, transform the traditional cultural conception, change present fathering culture "ruled by men" that a private entrepreneur has the final right of decision and makes decision optionally so as to make it form a kind of law culture as a leading factor; to run companies through the institutional construction; to change the notion that the family corporation is divided into "one of own side" and "stranger", to form the consciousness that everyone is equal inside corporations, thus combine the affinity based on emotion and equal consciousness governing by law as foundation together, to form the team advantage. Second, to desalinize the family management gradually. If the private corporations want to desalinize the family management gradually in the course of growing up, it can adopt methods of Fangtai's "Pocket Theory" or the Xingxiwang's "breaking up the family" based on the demand for development of the industry. Third, restructure the mechanism of faith. Through setting up laws and make them integrated, introducing competition mechanism and setting up "psychological agreement" in private corporations and other methods to restructure the mechanism of faith of private corporations, changing present states that private corporations especially family corporations mainly depend on the mechanism of relative trust and the mechanism of trust based on personal credit, letting the mechanism of legal trust and the mechanism of trust which emerges on the basis of the similarity play a main role. Fourth, make the corporate culture core competitiveness actively. It should form the characteristic corporate culture through figuring the characteristic conceptions of values; it should "govern thought" through the corporate culture. Human heart is the most priceless thing in the world, and you can't buy it with any amount of money. However the only thing that inspire and condense it is culture, therefore, corporation should make use of corporate culture to set up "psychological agreement" between corporate and staff, it should combine the staff's personal values with the core values, unifying the staff's thoughts and actions to reach common understanding; it should build the harmonious cultural atmosphere to produce the cohesiveness and centripetal force; it should inspire staff with culture to produce the impetus and creativity. Through setting up a study organization, to strengthen learning abilities of corporate constantly and make corporate carry on corporate cultural reform in time on the basis of persevering in core conception of value, thereby making companies adapt to the external environmental condition continuously.In conclusion, this article did a comprehensive study from different disciplines,and merge theory with practice on the basis of methods of international comparison. By studying some corporate culture cases of successful private corporations, testified and distillated the theories. There are some innovations in this article: first, this paper has brought the social capital theory into the analysis of private corporate cultures, and thought that corporate culture is a special social capital. Objective to construct corporate culture is to form trust each other and cooperation atmosphere. Second, this paper makes a systematic proof about the proposition that corporate culture force is corporate core competence, and considered that material resource, capital, talented person, core production and technology, institution and competitive advantages are not the core competence. It is the corporate culture that is the foundation of the core competence. Corporate culture is the pillar and motive force for corporate sustained development. Core competence is formed by integration of values. Corporate cultural core competence is a spiritual force and foundation of core competence. It embodies specific competence by affecting abilities to innovation, management and business. Finally, this paper tests and verifies corporate cultural core competence by analyzing some successful corporate culture. Third, put forward new explanation on the phenomenon that private corporations can't become big. This paper regards that the reason for the phenomenon of once private corporations grow big, they will be divided, is the traditional "divided family culture", that is the traditional culture concept which was originated from "Dingmu" system and "Zhuhoufenfeng" system.