مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اثر فرهنگ سازمانی بر عملکرد شرکت – الزویر 2018

Corporate culture is ‘‘a set of norms and values that are widely shared and strongly held throughout the organization” (O’Reilly and Chatman, 1996; Guiso et al., 2015). In a controversial New York Times op-ed, former Goldman Sachs vice president Greg Smith attributes Goldman Sachs’s previous success to its good culture promoting teamwork, integrity and humility, and in his book he blames its transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded company for the disappearance of this culture (Guiso et al., 2015). In a recent survey of 1461 North American CEOs and CFOs, Graham et al. (2017) find that 91% of executives view culture as very important at their firms, and that 78% consider culture as one of the top 3 or 5 factors that affect their firms’ value. The authors also point out that empirical evidence on whether and how corporate culture affects firm value and corporate decision making is underexplored. In this paper, we study whether and to what extent corporate culture, as captured by the intensity of corporate culture promotion through the Internet, affects the firm performance of China’s privately listed companies in terms of market performance, financial performance and innovation performance.1 In China, state-owned companies are controlled by the government, and their cultures are shaped by the political climate. In contrast, privately listed companies are publicly owned and can nurture their own cultures as they wish according to their own characteristics and purposes. Thus, we focus on China’s privately listed companies to study the impact of corporate culture on firm performance. Aside from anecdotal evidence, prior studies find some empirical evidence that corporate culture affects corporate decision making and firm performance. For example, Ahern et al. (2015) find that the volume of crossborder mergers and the combined announcement returns are lower when countries are more culturally distant in terms of trust and individualism. Corporate culture can also affect corporate reporting behavior. For example, Braguinsky and Mityakov (2015) argue that firms from developed countries have a culture of transparency, and that foreign-owned companies in Moscow are less likely to misreport their employees’ earnings due to this transparency. Overall, both anecdotal and empirical evidence shows the important role that corporate culture plays in corporate behavior and firm performance. However, culture can take different forms. Firms usually choose to promote corporate culture according to their firm characteristics. For example, high-tech companies, such as Apple, promote a culture of innovation, while customer-oriented companies, such as Walmart, promote a culture of integrity. Although Apple and Walmart promote two different cultures, they each promote a culture tailored to their own purposes. It is dif- ficult to say that innovation culture is superior to integrity culture, or vice versa. This is similar to cultures across different countries. Deshpande´ and Farley (2004) find that although cultural components differ across countries, the differences of mean and slope for the effect of organizational culture on firm performance across countries are not significant. For example, Japan and the United States may have different types of organizational culture, but neither leads to better performance than the other.