Blog 1:Can culture be managed within organizations?

The culture of an organization expresses its personality and character. Different organizations have different organizational cultures, reflected in their common values, beliefs, and assumptions. The key factors of an organization culture include its history and environment as well as the employees who lead and work for it. So when an organization’s culture is successfully established, does the leader decision-making have a strong impact on the organization’s culture? Is it appropriate for the development of the organization and the performance of internal personnel? What impact does organizational culture have on business development? Those will be discussed based on the organization culture management in this blog.

The Schein model has explained three levels of culture:’ What is assumed, what they say and what we see. There is a famous British fast fashion brand will be as an example to be evaluated based no the organization culture management. 

New Look, as a fast-fashion British brand established in UK since 1969. The brand has expanded rapidly with 519 stores in the UK and Ireland, 302 stores across Europe, Asia and China by 2019(New Look 2019). The New Look combines online and offline sells, and the official online website has spread all over 66 countries accounts for 20% of the total sales (New Look 2019). New look’s main target audience are the women aged 16-35 who likes affordable and fashionable products (NL 2014). Whether the consumers shopping women’s, men’s or any of other ranges; Inspire (sizes 18-28), Teens, Tall, Petite or Maternity, the ranges from New Look could offer a broad width of appeal hence all of the customers could purchase into the latest trends in a way that suits them. The New Look reacts quickly to the trends and successfully provide products to suit customers’ individual style (New Look 2019).

Consumer Mood Board

According to the New Look’s 2017-2018 annual report, the total revenue of New Look in 2018 was £1,347.8 million, decreased  £106.9 million than 2017 (New Look, 2018). In UK, the fashion industry contributed 32.3billion to the UK’s gross domestic product in 2017, up 5.4% on 2016 (Rush 2018). The drop in turnover confirms that the brand has been experiencing significant challenges in recent years based on the competitors rapidly grow and the internal weakness.

Compared with the New Look 3 main competitors Asos, Top shop and Bohoo, one of the significant reason that make New Look now experience difficulty is the organization culture management. If New Look does not have its own specific organization culture and strategy to support the survival of the company in this highly competitive industry, then the performance decline of enterprise losses is inevitable. A strong culture is critical to the success of an organization as it enables employees to identify their thoughts and feelings as well as increase their commitment to the organization (Deere and Kennedy 1988, Kanter 1984). Some people believe that organization culture is depended on the leader’s preferences, the enterprise only needs to follow and listen. This interpretation is narrow and unilateral. But the impact of organizer’s decision on organization culture also plays a key role. 

In recent years, the management of New Look has been committed to expanding stores to increase their revenue, while ignoring the implementation and development of the internal culture. The former boss Alistair McGeorg has blamed  the dire performance on the previous management team chasing a ‘young and edgy’ audience, and also lost connection with the corn customers (The guardian 2018). Despite its long history and story, New Look has not been an advantage in developing its organizational culture. Organizers have focused too much on how to scale up to meet the ambitions of shareholders and investors, ignoring product development and employee training so that they has spend most of their money investing in the financial sector, resulting in excessive cost output and less investment in products and employees.‘Companies win or lose based on the cultures they create’ (Puffer, 1999:). 

Ethical leadership begins with understanding the core values of the organisation and developing the discipline to incorporate them into the daily lives of the people. Virtue needs an ethical leader to reflect more on how the values, vision and voice are maintained within the common good (Ghuman and Aswathappa, 2010 p.406, Grace, 1999 p.10).

The Culture Web

The Cultural web can analyze organizational culture from six aspects. Organizational culture plays a significant for companies and organizations functions that from the strategy to leadership and how managers relate to and  how to interact with customers, as well as how knowledge is shared (Mats 2013). New Look has always meeting made satisfied young audience pursuit of rapid fashion renewal as one of their organizational cultures. However, when the author entered a number of stores to find that its staff’s service attitude is not good, the classification is messy and the same price of product quality can not be comparable with other key competitive brands, which undoubtedly reflects the lack of organizational culture and shortcomings.

In conclusion, to improve and manage New Look’s organization culture, new look need  to improve their commutation with the audience, pay more attention on the products’ quality and innovation as well as the customer services instead of only focusing on their shareholder’s dividend. The leaders should have a new plan about the market strategy what it suits for New Look and also need to develop a mission and vision for the company to build employees’ confidence. So that the culture be managed and developed within organizations.

References:

Schein, E. (1990). Organizational culture. American Psychologist, 45(2), pp.109-119.
Puffer, S. (1999). Global statesman: Mikhail Gorbachev on globalization. Academy of Management Perspectives, 13(1), pp.8-14.

Ghuman, K. and Aswathappa, K. (2010) Management: Concepts, Practice and Cases. New Delhi: Tata McGraw

Whittington, B. and Johnson, J. (2005). Pressure acid leaching of arid-region nickel laterite ore. Part III: Effect of process water on nickel losses in the residue. Hydrometallurgy, 78(3-4), pp.256-263.

Jahshan, E. (2018). New Look reports operating loss of £74.3m – Retail Gazette. [online] Retail Gazette. Available at: https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2018/06/new-look-reports-operating-loss-74-3m/ [Accessed 2 July. 2019].

Newlook.uk.com. (2019). newlook.uk.com. [online] Available at: http://newlook.uk.com/ [Accessed 2 July. 2019].