Organizational Culture and Honda

Honda understood the way a team plays as a whole determines its success and he treated others as equal and often worked in a workshop with his employees being the owner of a corporation.

During the last two decades the notion of organizational culture has achieved wide acceptance as a method to understand human systems and as one of the central concepts in the human resource management. The research of the data shows that every element of organizational culture can be seen as an important environmental condition influencing the system and its subsystems. One of the major duties of strategic leaders is to build and support the organizational elements that make up the collective work.

Organizational culture is the most fundamental element of the collective work. It includes the attitudes, beliefs, experience and values of the company. Hill & Jones (2001, p. 68) define organizational culture as ‘the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. Organizational values are beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another’.

Soichiro Honda is an exemplary leader. He was a simple man and people followed him as he inspired them. He demanded practical results, and he found how to achieve these results. Honda was a person with vision and passion. He learned to see failures as necessary steps toward success. Soichiro Honda instilled in his employees the drive to learn without fear of failure, having built the road to success.