Research On Mechanism And Evaluation Of Corporate Culture Infiltration Based On Self-organization Theory

A great many practical experiences research findings have revealed the fact that corporate culture plays an important role for the achievement of sustained competitive power and the success for organizations. Instead of superficial text and slogan mode of corporate culture, a cultural system is expected to construct to support generating strategies and guiding practical operation of organizations. Current studies of construction and transformation of corporate culture focus on the following aspects: generating cultural introduction strategies combined the situation of a specific trade or an organization, cultural conformity study of multi-organizations, proposing cultural diffusion policies based on a certain strategic orientation, such as core competitive edge, innovation or client, etc. Although the above academic achievements explored the constructing and introducing problems of organizational culture from different points of view, few has been used in practice and proved valuable, and the whys and wherefores of that can be generalized as following: great majority of current studies have just discussed general principles, process and influence factors of corporate culture construction form a static perspective, while ignoring the fact that corporate culture construction is a systematic subject, only from a integral and dynamic perspective to realize the dynamic connections between subsystems and ingredients, can we grasp the real nature of the globality and unitarily of a corporate culture system. Aiming at this, the function and evolvement mechanism of corporate culture is needed, which provides a road to reveal the interaction relationships between ingredients and a framework of a complete theory and an approach system constructed for practice.The experiences of many famous organizations, just as HP, Intel, 3M, TOYOTA abroad and Haier, HUAWEI at home undoubtedly provide us models and frameworks for the construction and transformation of corporate culture. Their corporate culture construction patterns have formed fairly perfect systems and which can be induced to our organizations if the production system, management style and strategic mode, etc. agree with ours. And it is a feasible approach that make the superior corporate culture infiltrate into our culture system, promote the alignment of the superior culture and our cultural system, to realize the success construction of corporate culture and its evolvement.Recent years, we have witnessed the frequent and productive use of theories and techniques from other fields in organizational culture researches. Imported views can help us to see problems afresh and to generate new ideas and solutions. Self-organization theory focuses on the search for the general laws of origination and evolvement mechanism of complicated systems. That is how spontaneous emergence of order comes out of chaos, and low-grade orders translate to advanced ones. Many diverse fields have exploded into a dynamic area with implications of self-organizing phenomena, including sociology, economics, communications research, culture studies and management. Undoubtedly, corporate culture system is a self-organizing and self-adaptive one, so the views of self-organization theory can help to see problems and to generate solutions for the organizational culture researches. And at the same time, many principles and methods in self-organization theory are of great value and significance for corporate culture research from a systematic and dynamic perspective.To sum up, the research subject of this paper can be summarized as following: combining self-organization theory, we explore the infiltration mechanism of corporate culture, and subsequently an empirical research is designed to justify the theoretical mechanism and model. Based on above theoretical and empirical research, important enlightenments for corporate culture construction, and practice programs can be got form a systematic and dynamic perspective, which will provide a reference of corporate culture construction for organizations.Based on the related principles of dissipative structure theory, Synergetics and Hypercycle theory, and combing theoretical and practical research methods, qualifying and quantifying methods, this thesis makes deep research on the infiltration mechanism of corporate culture, the evaluation of corporate culture infiltration level and the relationship between the infiltration level and organization performance. The contents of this thesis mainly include the following three aspects. Firstly, this thesis reveals the infiltration mechanism of corporate culture based on the related principles of self-organization theory. The infiltration mechanism of organizational culture can be summarized as the four infiltration elements of corporate culture—construction of self-organizing circumstance, formation of cultural fluctuation, competition and cooperation between subcultures and the hypercycle evolvement of corporate culture system,and the correlations and interactions between the four elements.According to dissipative structures theory and synergetic theory, there are several criterions for identifying self-organizing system: the system is open, far from the uniformity of an equilibrium state, there exit nonlinear interactions between system's components and fluctuations in systems, etc. The nature of construction of self-organizing circumstance is to provide environment conditions for systems'self-organizing evolvement.A macro stable state is governed by the fluctuation which grows most rapidly, and the formation process of a new ordered state can be summarized as that a system can meet ordered state through fluctuations. By reason that many superior cultural models can be introduced into organizations, so it is imperative to investigate if the appropriateness of the outer models to the original organizations. Therefore the nature of the formation of cultural fluctuation is to select the adaptive culture fluctuation, and make it improve with the evolvement of corporate culture system.An organizational culture emerges from the competition and cooperation process between the fluctuations and subculture's, then conversely in a force determines the mode of the subcultures and the whole system. By reason that the new born corporate culture produced combines the original culture on one hand and on the other hand, it comes under the influence of superior culture fluctuation, which promotes the outer culture system merging into the original one, so the newborn corporate culture is agreed with the original culture system.Under the fluctuation of a superior culture and with the automatic and overlapping connections between components of corporate culture system, all dimensions and components of the organizational culture system are integrated into a unitary whole and are pushed forward. During the process, the whole organizational culture system will seek to reach to a more stable and rational state and optimize itself, and the newborn organizational culture and subcultures will come forth with the continuance of the hypercycle process. This process is also the evolvement process of organizational culture and subcultures.The above four elements of corporate culture infiltration are equally important, they are interdependent and incident with each other, emerging as a closed cooperative unitary. And only through the coordinated development and active interactions of each element, the superior culture can realize the infiltration into the original corporate culture system. Therefore, to a great degree, the infiltration level of outer culture can be measured by the index value of the development and interaction level of the four infiltration elements.Secondly, we extend the definition of"coordination", construct an assessment scheme of system coordination, and then an evaluation model of corporate culture infiltration is built based on the corporate culture infiltration mechanism and the above coordination model.Through analyzing the coordination mechanism of systems, we define coordination as following: focusing on the goal of a system, promote the adequate and equal development of system components, and accelerate the active interactions between a system's components, a system and its components, a system and its environment, in order to realize the whole system's optimization and accord development. So the real nature of system coordination can be generalized as the following three aspects: proportionality, consistency and relevancy of subsystems and components.Most current studies of system coordination always illustrate coordination as one aspect of proportionality, consistency or relevancy, and we consider that it is imperfect and insufficient for grasping the nature of coordination. And it is necessary to develop an integrated model to measure the coordination level of systems with a view to the situations of the objects studied. Specifically, the coordination level is expressed by three indexes: values of the proportionality, consistency and relevancy level of system components.The four infiltration elements—construction of self-organizing circumstance, formation of cultural fluctuation, competition and cooperation between subcultures and the hypercycle evolvement of corporate culture system,illustrate the infiltration mechanism of superior corporate culture. They are interdependent and incident with each other, emerging as a closed cooperative unitary. And only through the coordinated development and active interactions of each element, the superior culture can realize its infiltration into the original corporate culture system. To a great degree, the infiltration level of outer culture can be measured by the development and interaction level of the four infiltration elements, furthermore, the development and interaction relationships between components is accord with the content of"coordination", so we can evaluate the infiltration level of superior culture through measuring the coordination level of the four culture infiltration elements. Based on the analysis of current quantitative methods of coordinability, proportionality, consistency and relevancy of systems, an integrative method model is built, that the values of the proportionality, consistency and relevancy level of corporate culture infiltration elements are evaluated through typical proportionality method, distance method and an improved He-Xie method respectively.Based on corporate culture infiltration mechanism and evaluation model proposed, and through investigating some automobile manufactures and the allied factories which promote TPS in Chang Chun, an empirical research framework is built to reveal the impact of infiltration level on organization performance. The outcome of regression analysis of the empirical research manifests that consistency and relevancy level of infiltration elements have remarkable influences on organization performance, and the influence of proportionality is relatively weak, so it is rejected in the stepwise regression analysis. However, the outcome of correlation analysis shows that proportionality has a positive and evident influence on organization performance, and the results of the above can be explained as that proportionality signifies the development levels of culture infiltration elements, which provides the precondition for consistency and relevancy to a great degree. Compared with consistency and relevancy it has weak direct influence on organization performance, while it has a noticeable indirect influence on organization performance, so to sum up, proportionality of culture infiltration elements has a positive influence on organization performance.The conclusion of correlation analysis of empirical research proves the fact that the coordination of culture infiltration elements has a promotion impact on organization performance, which has very important enlightenment for corporate culture construction: the four infiltration elements are interdependent and incident with each other, and they emerge as a closed cooperative unitary. And only through the coordinated development and active interactions of each element, the superior culture can realize its infiltration into the original corporate culture system. So it is more than just attaching importance to the development of the four culture infiltration elements, but lay special emphasis on the interdependence and interpenetration connections between the four. It is imperative to grasp the corporate culture infiltration mechanism and generate strategy system of culture construction from a systematic and global perspective.The variance analysis results of development level and coordination level of corporate culture infiltration elements according to different types of enterprises reveal the fact that joint ventures, minor enterprises and short history industries have universal higher scores on the above two indexes. And the variation analysis results also provide very important enlightenments for corporate culture construction that is to make full use of the advantages of different types of organizations, and develop a complimentary study mechanism to realize the successful construction of corporate culture construction finally.