MNG 3702 ASSIGNMENT 1

Unilever is an international organization, well known for its consumer product brands in foods and beverages, household care and personal sanitary products. In 2015 Unilever employed an estimated people and its strategic and organizational culture success has seen it identified among the top organizations to work for thanks to its outlook on sustainability, strong branding and a people-centric values and robust performance culture. Unilever’s strategies enjoy a good success rate and a solid competitive advantage against competitors in its environment. This could be attributed to their leadership capabilities, their resources, strong brands or even their people and organizational culture; in this paper we explore some of these elements further. 2. Question 1: Critically evaluate how organisational culture is used at Unilever to enhance and support strategy implementation. To clearly analyse and discuss the role of organizational culture in strategy implementation, one must accept that organisational culture is comprised of shared values, beliefs, taken for granted and behaviours of individuals within an organization and is the basis for strategy and that for successful strategy deployment and implemented successfully, it must first be entirely aligned with the organizational culture. It is true also that commitments and goals must be established within an organization to support and establish an organizational culture that embraces the organization’s strategy over time. 2.1.Organizational Culture and Individual culture: Attracting and Developing Talent To be convinced by my claim, what the reader needs to know is that organizational culture is a collection of the individual values, norms and behaviors shared among members of an organization such as Unilever (Schein 2010). It thus follows that strong group norms and dominant individual cultures within the organization will help create a cultural environment that either supports or is against the strategy. Unilever acknowledges this sentiment during recruitment and has developed a reputation and working environment that attracts like-minded, driven candidates that support their strategy and vision thereby making dominant the desired culture and creating a culture-induced peer pressure that steers general employee behavior in the required strategic direction. Recruiting new managers, executives and directors with an aligned mindset while supporting existing leaders will be helpful in successfully implementing strategy. Though it is the new talent that appreciates and understands the urgency and importance of contemporary issues better than older 2 generation executives, it is ordinarily that older generation that is responsible of making strategic decisions. All leaders need what Unilever calls ‘experiential sheep dip’ – that is, immersion in emerging trends and new realities – so that they can fully understand both the issues involved and how they can make a difference in their roles (Unilever Sustainability 2015). By creating or encouraging this uniform shared culture and vision among individuals in the organization, Unilever administers an organizational culture that remains compliant with the necessities