The question of whether culture has an impact on productivity cannot be overestimated. The same is true, of the question of the impact of different culture on productivity. But first of all, let us see what we mean by the word “culture”. We mean by the word culture in this perspective, what we considered the societal norms in the workplace.

For the purpose of this write-up, culture can be simplified to their root origin that could be those of flat culture and hierarchy culture in nature. From the perspective of the side of objectivity, we must strive to concede that most of us prefer the flat –based cultures as the most likely least restrictive in nature.

The reason being that it tends to allow some level of freedom and it is beneficial to the overall productivity of any workplace from human resources perspective compared to the hierarchical culture. To buttress this assertion, Neil McEachern, CHRP, (2011), opined that there is always a time and place for both culture to strive throughout history of any organization. In addition, “this can be seen in technology firms as they grow from humble beginning into a full fledged corporate heavyweight, from flat culture based to that of a hierarchy based organization”.

According to Parkinson’s law-“work expands so as to fill the time available for completion” and as it were, this quote is still very much relevant in the 21st century and can still be applied in the hierarchical workplace culture. According to McEachern, (2011), it is a very little gap that separates the larger corporations from the inflated bureaucracies in term of workplace culture. This is true, such that one only has to think how difficult it is sometimes for anything to be accomplished in the workplace compared to getting anything done at the local municipal office.

For the purpose of clearity, when an employee is expected to be at work for a set of duration of time, it is highly unlikely that one will be on high level of productivity for the duration of time. It seems obvious that for the sake of the aforementioned quotation above, any individual is likely to find something to fill up the time, which may not necessarily be what one is employed to do, instead, one might end up with the like of extended coffee break and frequent bathroom trip and even in the minefield of irrelevancy side discussions.
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However, this is related to hierarchy organization that are less flexible about work hours and how work should be conducted for completion due to their strict policy. Thus, contrary to the flat culture workplace, the hierarchical workplace culture is rigid in nature, in their imposition of the state of fear through which the employee is often penalized according to the strict guidelines and policy and not without inverse relationship to productivity. The similarity between flat and hierarchical culture of any workplace is the distinguishing factor of freedom afforded in the flat culture workplace. With this, any individual is able to use his/ her own initiative to determine the best possible method to complete any assigned task at any given time.

It is clear at this point, that with such freedom, it becomes a form of empowerment with positive impact of workplace culture of productivity. The same is true, that a flat corporate culture considered in this regard is often more relaxed by structure alone than the hierarchical culture that often tends to loses time filling the paper work instead of being productive.

Therefore, in reality culture do have an impact on productivity, because any persuasive argument for flat-base-culture workplace, would agree that, there is a time and place for both culture and it demand that with limited resources, capable hands must always be engaged to be productive ,regardless of the workplace culture.

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