Organizational Culture Analysis

Kimberly-Clark Corporation (KCC) has a strong organizational culture that allows employees to easily balance work life and they perceive each other as family. The company culture inculcates values of accountability and authenticity among its employees. This plays a key role in helping the organization remain true to its core values. Employee accountability is assessed by tracking the performance record of every member of the staff force. Individuals who are deemed to have performed dismally and failed to meet various targets over a specified period of time are let go while some leave on their own volition. Through the creation of a serious emphasis on accountability, Kimberly-Clark Corporation has over the years been able to establish a culture of performance based payment. Additionally, accountability has led to the establishment of a culture that allows for the recognition and rewarding of top performers within the organization. 

This performance oriented culture plays a key role in improving the company’s innovativeness. Authenticity and accountability are the two major constituents of the organizational culture at KCC. These components have a great influence on the nature and value of innovations made by the company. Innovations take up a lot of capital investments thus the need for accountability and authenticity. The experts tasked with the responsibility of ensuring the success of all innovations must, therefore, be able to articulate the need for such innovations and clearly demonstrate the feasibility and benefits that accrue to the company as a result of their adoption.

 In order for the company to achieve exemplary success in its innovations, the management must ensure total accountability of not only financial resources but also individual employee performance (Hogan & Coote, 2014). Additionally, the organization is fully committed to implementing new ideas that are of great value and provide positive returns. This is premised on one of the company’s values which are innovation. The existence of creative innovation as a core value of Kimberly-Clark Corporation makes it easy to implement new innovative ideas since the organizational structure supports attempts to improve the innovativeness of the company. There is no cultural element within the company that requires redesigning since the organizational culture encourages all forms of innovations that add value.

Strengthening an organization’s innovation culture requires the use of viable strategies that promote the sustainability of such innovations in the long term (Alvesson, 2016). These strategies include conducting frequent market research to gather information on the current developments within the industry as well as identifying competitor activities that pose a threat to the company’s current innovations. The research and development department must provide proposals with articulate creative ideas which upon implementation guarantee the success of the firm’s innovation (Hogan & Coote, 2014). Additionally, the company should inculcate a culture among employees that encourages them to voice their ideas no matter how simple they perceive them to be. This strategy allows the company to encourage creativity among its staff force. As a result, the organization ensures that it does not lose out on ideas which could be of value in innovations. In addition, the company should ensure that it has adequate budgetary allocation for the research & development and innovations department.

Communication within an organization should be done using appropriate tools in order to ensure that the message reaches its intended recipient (Alvesson, 2016). Effective communication of the innovative structure to employees should be done through the use of participatory mechanisms. Allowing the staff members to participate in the innovation processes in whichever way they can ensure that the innovative culture is inbuilt and the employees get accustomed to it. Capacity building for innovative thinking can, therefore, be achieved by allowing the employees to involve themselves in critical thinking processes thereby promoting the development of creative ideas from within the organization.

References

Alvesson, M. (Ed.). (2016). Organizational culture. Sage.

Hogan, S. J., & Coote, L. V. (2014). Organizational culture, innovation, and performance: A test of Schein’s model. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1609-1621.