Corporate Culture of Walt Disney Studios
Corporate culture is an important foundation for any organization that strives to improve its performance and sustain a competitive advantage over other organization. It plays an important role in enhancing leadership
and employee engagement into organizational activities. Due to the fact that Walt Disney Studios are recognized all over the world, its corporate culture is sophisticated and firmly established to sustain successful performance and organization. Its major focus is made on teamwork and cooperation, which is untypical of other international organizations that tend to practice a customer-oriented approach. To be more exact, constant socialization, on-the-job training, and diversification strategy are among the main elements of Walt Disney corporate culture that contributes to its organizational performance and competitiveness.
The major feature of Walt Disney corporate culture relates to the teamwork-centered approach. This algorithm prevailed at the beginning of the company’s activities. Specifically, while encountering specific dilemmas, the employees should make a decision and perform their best to reduce the risky situations. However, further management of the company’s projects was preceded by the extensive focus on customers (Lim, 2010). The
shifts in philosophy caused several takeover attempts that lead to the breakup of the company. Hence, innovation, storytelling, community, and quality were among the major values dictated by the Walt Disney’s corporate culture. (Disney Careers, n. d.). After the failure in management, Walt Disney executives have decided to restore the leadership and promote the new philosophy that returns its old corporate culture.
Traditionally, organizations are largely affected by their early culture. They shape a vision of the organization and provide an approximate philosophy that would later be advanced (Robbins, 2013). At the same time, they can also be hindered by the changes and novelties, which are not always successful, which is specifically shown by the Walt Disney example. In this respect, the process of shaping an organizational culture is based on three major factors (Robbins, 2013). First, the foundations hire and keep employees who are involved into a new working atmosphere. Second, they make the employees socialize, and, as a result, the community shapes its
own attitude and feeling. Finally, the founders’ personal attitude and behavior presents a role model for employees to follow and to be encouraged to join the created identity. Similar characteristics are typical of the
Walt Disney’s corporate culture that prioritized the importance of teamwork, which contributes to shaping a strong identity.
Although the company’s executives try to adhere to the old organizational culture, the changes are inevitable because they should adjust to the changed dictated by times. In this respect, it has been assumed, “the old corporate culture was an extension of Walt Disney himself – a business selling the American idea of progress, driven by private initiative, know-how, and up-to-dateness and small town values” (Levin, 2005, p. 137). Nonetheless, it has been assumed that the potential applications …
