Sustainable Enterprise Performance

5Enterprise Culture

5.1. The importance of enterprise culture for performance

Since the advent of globalization and global awareness of strategic issues, which are linked to the appearance of the Internet, systemic uncertainty has grown to the point where top quality is not only the way to generate social recognition but also to adapt to a shifting environment. This applies to individuals as well as organizations. Adapting to socially valorized standards does not suffice anymore; we must be free of these staples in order to be better connected, free of thinking patterns in order to be more innovative. The ability to innovate, to find new solutions to unpredictable problems that arise, is becoming an essential quality. Insofar as today’s concern is customer personalization, we are no longer concerned with the mass production of identical products, characteristic of industrial capitalism. We are now concerned with the production of products that can be adjusted to the particularities of a certain customer or environment. The best-adapted enterprises cultivate adjustment and permanent innovation.

For Elliot Jacques from the Tavistock Institute in London, enterprise culture is defined by its way of thinking and acting, which is more or less shared and must be learned and accepted (Jacques 1997). For Maurice Thévenet, enterprise culture is “a set of shared references in the organization, constructed throughout its history in response to problems encountered by the enterprise” (Thévenet ...