【文章內容簡介】 a variety of areas,such as treatment of customers, standards of performance,innovation, etc. An increasing number of successful anizationshave, at least in part, attributed their success to effective culture management. For example, Starbucks Coffee Company, which has grown from just two retail stores in Seattle (USA) to more than 2500 stores worldwide during the past decade, views culture as a critical factor in the 6 anization’s success (Schultz and Yang, 1997。 Flamholtz and Randle, 1998).Specifically, the pany’s paradigm is that: ‘the way we treat our people affects they way our people treat our customers, and, in turn, our success, which includes financial performance.’ This belief has led the pany to a number of human resource practices that are designed to enhance people’s feeling of being valued by the include the widespread use of stock options and the practice of providing full benefits to all employees who work more than 20 hours per week. There are many areas in which corporate culture influences behavior and decisionmaking. However,there appear to be four key areas in which all anizations must manage their culture or values: (1) the treatment of customers, (2) the treatment of an anization’s own people or human capital, (3) standards of anizational performance, and (4) notions of accountability. These are the ‘key areas of cultural concern’ for all anizations. Naturally, there are also many other areas of anizational performance that are of concern, but these tend to be more idiosyncratic to specific firms. Such additional areas can include beliefs with respect to innovation, corporate citizenship, openness to change, as well as others. Culture and Organizational Performance The basic paradigm underlying the notion that culture affects performance is based upon a few key ideas. The first is that culture affects goal specifically, panies with ‘strong’ cultures are more likely to achieve their goals than those with relatively ‘weak’ cultures. Socalled ‘strongculture anizations’ are thought to have a higher degree of anizational success (measured in market value or other financial measures of performance), because of a believed link to motivation. As stated by Kotter and Heskett, strong cultures are often said to help business performance because they create an unusual level of motivation in employees (1992, ). In addition to the hypothesized relationship betweenculture and financial performance, culture also has e to be viewed as ponent of other anizational effectiveness or success models (Flamholtz and Randle, 1998, 2021). It has been theorized that the role of culture, as part of a six factor framework,explains anizational effectiveness and,in turn,financial performance (Flamholtz, 1995。 Flamholtz and Randle,1998, 2021). Specifically, culture has been viewed as a critical anizational development area,or key strategic building block,of succes