Culture and Organisation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Culture and Organisation - Essay Example The company is involved in a range of services, including consumer banking, credit cards, investment banking, mortgage loans, corporate banking, wealth management and private banking. The bank refers both Hong Kong and United Kingdom as its ancestral markets. The company has more than 7500 offices across 85 counties. The branches and subsidiaries are spread across Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and South America (HSBC, 2014d). The company operates across four business categories: commercial banking; global banking and markets; wealth management and retail banking; and overseas private banking. HSBC’s internal environment is based on values such as, integrity, diversity, cultural inclusion as well as global expansion for growth and development (HSBC, 2014a). Employee empowerment is a major strategy followed by HSBC for overall development of the organisation. The bank believes that empowered employees will help in meeting expectations of customers, society, investors and regulators. The bank has also given major stress on its culture and rich tradition. The culture of HSBC is unique mixture of traditional values as well as contemporary management practices, making it a distinctive organisation (Trompenaars, 1993). Significant differences lies among different cultures in terms of behaviour, communication and body language (Adler, 1997). One of the major distinctions between high and low context cultures was proposed by Edward T. Hall, a well-known anthropologist from America. High context culture is defined as the one where communication is highly implicit and coded in physical context or other communication channels, apart from verbal. A low context culture can be defined as a type of communication where major part of the information is present in explicit code and little is transmitted through other mediums such as, gestures or body language (Chaney, 2005). The current focus of the report is to understand the organisational practice followed