Weak Culture - Definition, Importance & Example
What is Weak Culture?
Weak culture is an organizational culture where the company values are not very strong and not accepted by all employees. Weak culture results in instability, lack of innovation, low customer focus and even high attrition. Weak culture is a result of flawed policies, poor decision making, lack of communication etc. In such a culture, the company acquires a lot of strong & rigid procedures & bureaucracy, which is not too favorable with employees.
Organizational culture is primarily looked as a strong culture or a weak culture.
Importance of Weak Culture in an Organization
Culture is one thing that shapes up the organization structure. Many factors like decision making, policy making, employee satisfaction and engagement depend upon the organizational culture. Strong and weak, there are two types of organizational cultures. Weak culture is something that is very much individualistic in nature.
Weak culture is actually followed by organizations who do not focus more upon the concept of groups and teams. They have attractive incentive and reward systems to respect and give due value to the contribution by individuals. The organization culture becomes that of a closed one. The interaction amongst the employees is less, though individual innovation and creativity is high, there is less on influence on organization as the individuals confine their creativity to themselves to get advantages of incentives. The decision making is not participative in a weak culture and the organization just gets confines to the mere accomplishments of targets, there is no such observed improvement of the organization. This proves to be disastrous for the organization in the long run as they become unable to pace up with the competition from the external environment.
Difference Between Weak Culture and Strong Culture
Organization culture are of two types – strong culture and weak culture. Strong culture is the one that at initial stages only motivates and engages people in working in groups and work together towards the organizational goals. The reward system is purely based on the group goals and attitude of the group as a whole. Engagement levels are high as individual competition becomes less. But on the other hand, weak cultures at the initial stage focus more on individuals, rather they have reward systems for individuals to meet organizational goals. This increases the possibility of ego clashes amongst the individuals which proves to be risky for the organization as a whole, due to strong individual incentive system the workers start working with a lot of motivation but the increase in conflicts proves to be bad for accomplishment of organizational goals.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Weak Culture
Despite mainly drawbacks, some advantages of weak culture are as follows:
1. Individual creativity and innovation.
2. Strong incentive system.
3. Strong individual reward systems.
Disadvantages of weak culture are:
1. Lack of group thinking
2. High chances of conflicts and ego clashes.
3. Less successful organizations.
4. Lack of participative decision making.
Example of Weak Culture
Suppose there are two persons working in organization A and B respectively, the employees being A and B as per their organization label. Organization A is known to follow a weak culture i.e. lack of transparency, low motivation, unfavorable policies etc. Organization B is known to follow a strong culture by motivating & skilling employees, good work life balance, systematic policies etc. Both employee A and B are working with a good pay in the organization. But employee B is more satisfied with the work environment than employee A, as the employee engagement is more for him in the organization and he feels like staying in the organization for a long time. But the employee A is not willing to work more as he is not getting that spirit to work for the organizations due to weak culture.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Weak Culture along with its overview.
This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
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