Influence of Apple’s Organizational Culture and Learning on its Change Initiatives

According to Chikhale and Mansouri (2015), Apple features a classic hierarchical organizational structure with some significant characteristics from other types of organizational frameworks. The company's ability to adapt is credited to its innovative culture and the leadership of its former CEO Steve Job. Currently led by Tim Cook, the business has modified its organizational structure a little bit to meet market and industry expectations (Jinjin, 2013). The success of Apple Inc. is significantly influenced by its culture. The organizational culture and structure of the company determine its capacity for learning and implementing changes, new strategies, and new policies. The attributes of the company as a learning organization are grounded in the culture and vision (of changing the world).

How Apple’s Culture and Strategy Influences Learning

Apple effectively develops and integrates its employees into a culture that facilitates fast innovation. The innovation is seen in merchandises such as the Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad. The organizational culture at the company has relevant attributes to guarantee that the firm leads in its markets. The culture effectively supports the company’s leadership given its primary characteristics that fit the enterprise. One trait that influences learning at the organization is superior excellence (Meyer, 2017). Apple Inc.’s organizational culture encompasses a policy of hiring only the top-notch employees. Steve Jobs is remembered for readily firing a worker who failed to attain his expectations. Tim Cook has maintained the tradition in the firm’s organizational culture as a critical factor of success particularly in designing and developing products.

Creativity as an aspect of culture demands that the company employs staff based on their skills, knowledge and creativity acumen. As an aspect of organizational culture, creativity assists the company in maintaining its learning ability and capacity to address business and client needs. Furthermore, the culture at Apple is highly inventive. In fact, the company is regularly appraised as one of the leading innovative firms (Meyer, 2017). The company trains and encourages all employees to innovate in employee work productivity and the contribution in concepts to processes of product development at the firm. The sequence of product launch illustrates knowledge management and learning that occurs in the company to introduce new product attributes.

Another important quality of the culture is secrecy. Steve Jobs highly recommended secrecy as an organizational culture at the firm. The mystery comprises part of the firm’s strategy to mitigate theft of intellectual property or proprietary information (Meyer, 2017). After hiring, staff agrees to Apple’s secrecy culture that is mirrored in the rules, policies, and employment agreements. The aspect of the company’s culture assists to guard the business against corporate spying and the adverse employee poaching effects.

How Apple’s Culture and Learning Capability Supports or Distracts Change initiatives

As described previously, Apple stresses the aspect of secrecy in its organizational culture. The culture of confidentiality both props and distracts the company from its change initiatives. Apple Inc. has its learning organization, which is the Apple University. The activities that go on at its University are a secret but have continued to attract notable academicians to work at its university, which Steve Jobs created as a kind of internal MBA program for staff further adding intrigue and secrecy. It is uncommon for firms to shy away from revealing information and Apple act as an original illustration of a company reluctant to raise the curtain. Innovation can be a sensitive aspect for some companies, which the reason why a technology firm like Apple shields its internal processes from public glare.

According to Apple, keeping secrets is one way of obtaining a competitive advantage. Even in the company and university, some people are not permitted to know the happenings in another department of the company. As such, even information concerning learning and development is kept private among team members to avert an inadvertent disclosure of information to the public particularly in programs created around leadership development. Such programs often encompass competitive and business strategies.

Nonetheless, sometimes collaboration and, thus, the sharing of possibly sensitive information can be inevitable. Whereas the organizational culture of the company generates strengths to the business, it also renders limitations and challenges the firm. For instance, the secrecy atmosphere limits rapport among employees (Meyer, 2017). However, Apple has been fine-tuning its business culture gradually to align it to the dynamics of its corporate setting correctly.

To conclude, Apple has a traditional hierarchical organization structure and organizational culture and leadership that facilitate the capability of the enterprise to learn and implement changes. Overall, the culture and strategy at Apple Inc. influence the learning of the organization culture of innovation in merchandises comprising Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad. On the other hand, the culture is secrecy assists to guard the business against corporate eavesdropping and the adverse effects or worker poaching. The culture of confidentiality is one way of obtaining a competitive advantage but is a distracting aspect because the secrecy atmosphere restricts rapport among employees.







References

Chikhale, M. M., & Mansouri, M. (2015). An Agile and Collaborative Framework for Effective Governance to Enhance Management in Large-Scale Enterprise Business Systems: The Case of Apple Inc. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 16(3), 283-293.

Jinjin, T. A. N. (2013). Strategic Analysis of Apple Computer Inc. & Recommendations for the Future Direction. Management Science and Engineering, 7(2), 94.

Meyer, P., (2017). Apple Inc. organizational culture: features and implications. Panmore Institute. Retrieved 30 March 2017 from, http://panmore.com/apple-inc-organizational-culture-features-implications