PepsiCo is one of the leading food and beverage companies in the US and the world as a whole. It is involved in the production and selling of eighteen brands of beverages and snack foods and makes close to $98 billion in retail sales. PepsiCo brands include Pepsi Cola, Quaker, Frito-Lay and Gatorade products served over 200 nations. By closely observing the company operations in the various nations, it is easy to deduce the struggle experienced between the Societal and organizational culture. Societal culture simply imply the shared training of the mind to a collective defined as a society while organizational culture, on the other hand, may be looked at as the general training of the mind, with the collective defined here as organization.
There are three sources of influence to the organizational culture. These sources also form part of the ethical values guiding the operations. Collectively, the three sources of influence work to create an organizational culture. These sources include the beliefs of the founding leaders of the organization and the successive organizations history, the uniqueness of the industry that encompass the organization and the general society that surrounds the organization locality.
Among the three, the first two bear a significant influence regarding the ethical perspectives across cultures involved in the organization. First, the beliefs and values upheld by the founders on such general issue such as human nature, the value of time, attitude towards work and interpersonal associations affect the culture of the organization. This is prominent in the initial selection of staff and staff member’s self-selection from the organization in cases where they feel they are unfit, resulting to a self-perpetuating sharing of values and ideas between members of the organization. This parameter of the organization can be detected in conversations held among members, questions asked of a job applicant in an interview, in the stories, legends, rites and in rituals that mark events in the organization. Following the fact that organizational culture builds itself with organizations founded within a single industry and a single society, societal impacts allegedly affect the organizations equivalently, thus essentially overlooked.
Secondly is the influence of the industry that serves to affect the organizational culture through the limitations it places on the manners of all individuals in the organization not excluding the founding members. Specific organizational traditions bear crucial role that serves to ensure its survival in the industry while supporting the goals set. The founders cannot ignore these traditions. The economic setting surrounding the industry, as well as the role played by the industry in the national economy shapes these traditions. Certain organizational way of life may be imitative, for example, by the presence of a well-established labor union that benefits from countrywide subscription. These practices, consequently, may dictate on the organizational members’ values linked to work, establishing subcultures in the corporations if required. Its control, even though not as easily seen, gradually turns out to be clear to any newcomer in the course of settling into the work routine.
It is vital to note that, despite industries commonness across societies, industry-level limitations and the results of those limitations may vary extensively from society to society. Here, Status as a national monopoly, Governmental regulation, national economic system and development of the industry within a society serve as some of the factors that influence the ways in which an industry works in a known society. In this regard, the control that societal culture may pose on economic/industrial variables of a nation only works to make the situation more complex.
Lastly, the influence of the societal culture, which happens to have the least readily discernible influence on the manner in which things make progress in organizations nested within that culture. Its relationship to organizational culture is less noticeable to a party of the nesting society as compared to persons outside it. Given that organizational culture examination works within the framework of a single society, society as a probable basis of influence on organizational culture is often ignored merely on grounds that it is not salient to the researchers. In addition, the subject of the level to which societal culture influences organizational culture is one of significant dispute. Given that national culture is a basic part of the environment in which organizations operate, organizational culture by insinuation ought to be influenced by the general societal. The operations of the company just like many other studied shows that it works as “open systems influenced by the environment.”
Here, the general societal “operationalize” organizational culture with regard to perceived distances between pairs of concepts such as seniority, happiness, success, supervisor, the self, one’s job, money, and the names of the countries of their location. For example, a study conducted on different members of the company originating from two different nations showed significant differences between organizational cultures of members located in their respective countries but established little divergence between the members working in one country. These results serve to highlight the influence of national culture, above that of leader’s values, in shaping organizational culture. Furthermore, previous research has shown a well-built linear connection between perceived distance untying national cultures and that untying organizational cultures.
In this regard, values shared at the level of a society contribute to about fifty percent of the discrepancy in values shared at the level of an organization. However, values shared at the level of a society account to a small extent for the variance (5-10 %) with regard to organization practices. This follows the presumptions that many other things that include industry –level requirements, limit organizational practices. In addition, the same societal values lead to different practices at the organizational level. In this case, a high level of uncertainty avoidance in a society causes organizational members to take on many strict policies, while a high level of uncertainty avoidance in a different society results, in organizational members, developing remarkably few policies. Such members opt to meet and confer on each situation broadly to end up with a clear consensus on the steps to be taken. Consequently, the members reduce the level of disparity drawn from the cross-cultural operations of the company.
In summary, cross-cultural perspectives central goal revolves around the isolation of differences attributable to organizational culture from the variations linked to societal culture or organizational requirements. Here, the main parameters considered include the common and unifying opinion, values, feelings, and dealings of organizational members in reaction to organizational challenges and issues. A combination of all the a fore mentioned factors form the basis of perspectives that cut across different cultures, otherwise referred to as cross cultural perspectives.