Organizational Culture As the Glue Between People and Organization: A Competence-Based View On Learning and Competence Building**/Organisationskultur Als Bindeglied Zwischen Mensch Und Organisation: Eine Kompetenzbasierte Betrachtung von Prozessen Des Lernens Und Der Kompetenzentwicklung

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Organizational Culture As the Glue Between People and Organization: A Competence-Based View On Learning and Competence Building**/Organisationskultur Als Bindeglied Zwischen Mensch Und Organisation: Eine Kompetenzbasierte Betrachtung von Prozessen Des Lernens Und Der Kompetenzentwicklung

1. Introduction

Employees depend on companies and companies depend on employees. No firm can be successful without making manpower available. It is rather undisputed that corporate culture as an organizational phenomenon and an informal coordination mechanism is made of shared minds and values of the individuals and, thus, connects both the personal and organizational level. Understood as glue between people and organization, the corporate culture provides the firm with a high level of structural stability and reliability, once an organizational culture is adopted and penetrates the firm. However, this stability does not imply inflexibility, for the corporate culture belongs to the most important sense-making elements of an organization. As such, the culture can fuel organizational moves and, in particular, processes of organizational learning in a rather self-energizing manner.

Our paper addresses the role of corporate culture as a 'linking pin' between people and organizations by specifying how corporate culture contributes to the process of building organisational competences by fostering the learning process in firms. We employ the competence-based theory of the firm, henceforth: CbTF (Foss/Ishikawa 2007; Freiling et al. 2008), as the frame of reference to understand the role corporate culture plays in organizations in the context of learning and competence building. In this context we build on previous research that outlined the role of culture as an informal structural element that provides the firm with a coordination potential different from other institutions (Osterloh et al. 2001). Organizational culture allows for a rather smooth run of knowledge sharing and interaction processes based on informal ties among the people. These ties grow over time and provide the firm with stability and flexibility. They reduce behavioral uncertainty of internal interaction processes by growing trust and commitment and, in connection with learning processes, enable the firm to explore and exploit business opportunities more intensively (Nooteboom 2006). In this context, it is rather undisputed that a learning process is needed for the purpose of competence building (Prahalad/Hamel 1990) so that we need to select a concrete learning process model in this paper and extent it, where necessary. The Crossan at al. (1999) model allows for connecting the individual learning level and the organizational layer. In particular, the model explains how learning and competence building, supported by the organizational culture, 'transcends' from people via groups to companies by processes of intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing. The pro...

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