How does culture influence behaviour.

Why some countries have developed and others are not, why some countries are unstable and others are not, why people in some countries don’t care about their country but in others people do, why? because of the culture, culture is a collective attribute of a group, how they react, what they eat, what they perceive as good or bad, what they think is normal or not normal.

Culture plays a vital role in shaping the society and the country. A good culture makes it easy and natural to progress, a collective progressive behaviour is a boon to a country. It seems like progress is happening automatically.

What shapes culture

How culture affects citizens, citizens reflect the culture, you can easily identify a culture by examining the behaviour and acts of local people in a country, observe how they react to a negative stimulus and how they react to a dishonest/unfair opportunity, put them in a situation and see how they react. It’s not that this behaviour is their individual responsibility, the culture plays an important role, for most of the people the behaviour is just built automatically through experiences and events they experienced and they don’t give a serious thought on how different experiences and events shape their behaviour.

Political leadership

In a country, the political landscape changes with time, and people with diverse beliefs and motivations hold power to motivate and alter the thinking of a majority of people in the country, this belief and motivation of leaders affect the culture for the good or for the bad. People learn new habits, certain odd behaviour becomes new normal and definition of bizarre changes. These leadership changes over time shape the culture, a good leadership induce and motivate everybody around them to attain good habits and deliver their best with honesty and affects the behaviour of almost everyone in the country. The vice versa of it is also true, a bad leadership, which has selfish motivation affect the culture badly and it encourages everyone to act selfish and selfishness creates a bad culture, in such culture self-interest defines the normal behaviour and not the social values.

Big events

big events like war, political movements change the culture and induce new habits in people. Our habits change when we have to survive in an extraordinary situation, we, human adapt to it quickly to survive. Like in a place where there is a prolonged war, people become extremely anxious and children become violent and people stop caring much about ethical values. If some country is going through economic crises and people don’t have much money to feed their children, people develop a bit of dis honesty to save and earn more money and that become new normal. The bad thing about these events is that they happen and culture change but once this event is over, the culture change persist. The sequence of such events shapes the culture.

How culture affects corporate productivity

In corporations, the cultural traits like hard work, fair competition, free speech, open feedback and mutual respect affect overall corporate’s productivity and longevity. The culture where employees can speak freely about issues and opportunity helps to shape the corporate culture. In such an environment new hires who are mediocre employees of other companies become stars in the new culture, they probably have never gotten a chance to perform fairly in earlier organisation’s ill cultured environment but here they can thrive.

A culture boost not only productivity but creativity also, employees who know they can talk about new opportunity and would not be discouraged, usually come up with innovative ideas. Culture also boost customer trust, a satisfied, happy and respected employee treat customers well and do his best to make them happy, a happy mind is best suited to spread happiness.

A lot can be changed and achieved with culture, we as leaders must understand that in addition to our current responsibilities to deliver we must think of long term and take right steps and put forth right examples which shape culture in the right way.